BITE ME SADOMASOCHISTIC GENDER RELATIONS IN
CONTEMPORARY VAMPIRE
Introduction
I want to be one. I want to walk at night with you and fall in love and
drink blood.
Kill me. Make me into a vampire too. Bite me. Take me with you.
Poppy Z. Brite
Lost Souls
Although referred to as the undead, vampires are very much alive and have
been since their genesis in early nineteenth-century literature. Generic vampires—
threatening, nocturnal, and (today) inhumanly attractive—are immortal insofar as
they have never completely vanished from popular culture, yet their individual
image and lore have been more ephemeral than eternal. From the earliest vampire
literature to that of post-modernity, the vampire has mutated, “feed[ing] on his age
distinctively because he embodies that age” (Auerbach 1). Indeed, Stephenie
Meyer’s Edward Cullen of Twilight (2005) offers a stark, even comical, contrast to
Lord Byron’s Augustus Darvell of “Fragment of a Novel” (1816), illustrating the
widely disparate fears and desires of each generation and suggesting both the
metaphorical defanging of the erotic Other by twenty-first-century American culture
and the increasingly youthful (and female) audience of vampiric fiction.
Because vampires are Othered incarnations of an age, such canonical
vampire literature from then and now offers an intriguing investigation into the
social desires and fears of specific cultures at specific time periods. The first
vampires’ interactions focused on the homosocial relationship between men within
patriarchal Romantic European society, observed in the dealings between the
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unknown protagonist and the brooding, vampiric Augustus Darvell of Byron’s
“Fragment of a Novel” (1816) and between Aubrey and Lord Ruthven in John
Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819); women, victims or not, remained in the
background. Eighty years later, Bram Stoker projected the vampire’s highly
eroticized bloodlust onto women. Dracula (1897) set the precedent for the most
recognizable image—the suave and seductive vampiric man—of future
representations of the vampire, as well as the most common image of his victims—
chaste and innocent women.
Early vampire works can be seen as foreplay for what is and has always been
an overwhelmingly sexual genre; relationships between humans and vampires enact
a pleasurable cat-and-mouse seduction in which, generally, a powerful male
vampire dominates a powerless female human, infatuated and submissive. These
dichotomies of the dominator/dominated are engendered within sadomasochism, so
the term aptly lends itself to an exploration of gender relations within the context of
vampire fiction. Although not every vampire story contains sadomasochistic
elements, the chosen sample of literature reveals such a theme is present and
prevalent, particularly in some of the most enduring and popular works of vampire
fiction. In my analysis of two contemporary vampire franchises—Anne Rice’s
Interview with the Vampire of The Vampire Chronicles series and Stephenie Meyer’s
Twilight series—my proposed thesis will demonstrate the role gender plays within
sadomasochistic vampiric relationships, and, by extension, within same-sex and
male-female relations in late twentieth- and early twenty-firstcentury America.
If our vampires facelessly mirror the age we inhabit, then what do sadistic
vampires and masochistic humans evince about our culture? In sinking my teeth
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into this literature and drinking its contents in terms of sadomasochism and gender,
I question why such patriarchal themes of oppression recur, and what implications
these conditions perpetuate as this literature is inscribed and reinscribed by its
readers.
Theorizing Sadomasochism
Sadism demands a story.
Laura Mulvey
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
de Sade and von Sacher-Masoch
Writing in late eighteenth-century France, the Marquis de Sade, infamous for
his libertine writings that emphasized sexual perversity, ignited an erotic
phenomenon whose terminology, i.e. sadism, is derived from his name. Acts of
sodomy, rape, humiliation, and violent debauchery characterize de Sade’s writings,
as reflected in his most popular works, and it is such graphically pornographic
literature that gave rise to public awareness of violent sexual dominance. Sadism,
then, is one’s exertion of power over and infliction of pain—physical, emotional,
and/or psychological—on another for, more often than not, sexual gratification.
Justine, of de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791), is an unsuspecting and
innocent young woman whose unshakable faith in God leads her to pursue a life of
chastity and piety in a cruelly lascivious and atheistic society. Despite her intention
to live morally and virtuously while desperately destitute, she repeatedly
encounters debauched and depraved individuals who demean her in every sense of
the word; Justine is brutally and incessantly violated— sexually, physically, and
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emotionally—and taunted about her continued religious faith by those who
sadistically utilize their roles in society to exert power over and victimize innocents.
All but one of her dominators are male and the vast majority of dominated
characters are female, demonstrating the patriarchal authoritarian structure of de
Sade’s Revolutionary France.
Similarly to de Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch also wrote works whose
sexually perverse content generated a term coined after him. Masochism, on the
opposite pole of sadism, requires submission on the part of the victim; masochists
derive pleasure from having pain inflicted upon them or, alternatively, by delaying
the consummation of pleasure through pain. Von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in
Furs chronicles the enactments of Severin von
Kusiemski’s masochistic fantasies. Severin desperately desires to be his mistress
Wanda von Dunajew’s sexual slave, victim to her most wicked whims. Although she
initially does not wish to satisfy him in this way, she eventually becomes a
subordinating sadist. Wanda must first be convinced by Severin to play the role of
dominatrix: “‘I am afraid I won’t be able to, but I’ll try it for your sake, because I love
you’” (39). Cloaked in furs and addressed as Venus by Severin’s request, Wanda
eventually drives Severin to the brink of suicide, finding another lover (Alexis
Papadopolis) whose sadistic tendencies mold Wanda into a submissive masochist.
Severin is appalled and terrified for his life when Wanda and Alexis torture him, so
severs their sadomasochistic contract and leaves Wanda forever. Years later,
Severin receives a note from Wanda in which she explains her assuming a sexually
dominant persona only to cure him of his submissive affliction and to make him into
a dominating and masculine man.
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There are interesting gender binaries at play within Venus in Furs, and I would
argue males and masculinity are victorious by the denouement, namely, because
Severin controls the masochistic play between Wanda and himself (until Alexis
enters the picture), with Wanda the initially unwilling torturer and with Severin able
to terminate the contract when it proves no longer to his liking. In addition, the
dominant-submissive model von Sacher-Masoch so clearly articulates has most
often been replicated in ways that “naturalize” or construct the dominator as male
and the dominated as female. Well-known erotic dominator/dominated texts—such
as Pauline Réage’s The Story of O (1954), Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris
(1972), and E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)—all gender the masochist as
feminine, and, notably, many of these texts are authored by women.
Sadism and Masochism
Gilles Deleuze configures sadism and masochism as two distinctly different
phenomena. According to Deleuze, with sadism, we are “in the presence of a
torturer seizing upon a victim and enjoying her all the more because she is
unconsenting and unpersuaded”; in contrast, with masochism, we are “dealing
instead with a victim in search of a torturer who needs to educate, persuade and
conclude an alliance with the torturer in order to realize the strangest of schemes”
(20). In other words, the relationship between sadist and victim does not require any
alliance between the two—and, from the sadist’s perspective, any cooperative
relationship may prove detrimental to pleasure—whereas the relationship between
masochist and torturer does require mutual consent. This suggests that two
different types of sadism are potentially available for enactment: one in which the
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victim remains incidental; the other in which the victim is highly relevant, if only
because the relationship between tortured and torturer is “contractual.” In the first
instance, the victim may or may not be a masochist; in the latter instance, she/he
most probably is. In either instance, the sadist holds the position of dominator,
whose power is reinforced and confirmed by the helplessness (cooperative or
otherwise) of the victim.
Sadism is what Freud termed the “instinct for mastery which easily passes
over into cruelty” and “the instinct for mastery, or the will to power” (as qtd. in
Massé 78), and a victim, willing or otherwise, satisfies these needs. For Gilles
Deleuze, the “paternal and patriarchal theme undoubtedly predominates in sadism”
(59), gendering it a predominantly masculine act (though women may also be
sadists).
One might easily argue that two types of masochism also exist: contractual
masochism, in which victim and torturer engage in fantasized “play” within agreed-
upon parameters; and sociocultural masochism, in which oppressed individuals
submit to pain at the hands of their dominators in order to avoid more egregious
punishment, accrue rewards, or gain favor—a perverse form of “social contract.”
Several questions arise: Are both types of masochism gendered, and, if so, what are
the implications of such gendering? Are both forms of masochism pleasurable—that
is, do both types of victims enjoy the infliction of pain, and, if so, to what end? And
is contractual female masochism—that is, female masochism in the service of
“play”—influenced by sociocultural female masochism?
On the surface, contractual masochism appears genderless—it is “play” or
“fantasy” after all, in which two consenting adults agree to perform specific roles,
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and certainly the sadomaschistic dyad may be played out between members of the
same or opposite sex. Yet, on closer examination, gender permeates these
contractual arrangements. Deleuze writes of the contractual arrangement between
male masochist and female sadist (the only type of masochism Deleuze
acknowledges): The “contract in masochism…involves a master-slave relationship,
and one furthermore in which the woman is the master and torturer” (92); the
maternal predominates in male masochism, creating a fantasy wherein the father is
the beaten (66). Deleuze’s female torturer “enjoys hurting and torturing others, but
it is significant that her actions are prompted by a man or otherwise performed in
concert with a man, whose victim she is always liable to become” (48). Deleuze’s
female sadism and male masochism thus imply male authority, which, however,
replicates the dynamic involved in male sadism and female masochism, as male
authority also dominates in contractual arrangements between male sadists and
female masochists.
In Pauline Réage’s The Story of O (1954) and E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of
Grey (2011)— both of which portray female masochists in contractual
sadomasochistic relations—the male torturers retain control over the “play.” In other
words, in the case of heterosexual contractual sadomasochism, the male tends to
dominate the narrative, and it is his pleasure that predominates, regardless of who
is playing victim and who is playing torturer.
In regard to homosexual male sadomasochistic relations, the results of a
study conducted in 2001 show that those males with a “more heterosexual
orientation were more likely to have a masochistic preference while the more gay
respondents were more likely to be sadistically oriented (Nordling et. al. 42); “gay
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male subjects were more likely to engage in a larger number of behaviors of the
hypermasculinity region,” whereas “straight male subjects . . .
were more likely to engage in a larger number of humiliation behaviors” (52). Male-
male sadomasochism, then, follows either the Deleuzian model of male humiliation
(with the masochistic male still retaining some measure of narrative control) or the
heterosexual model of masculine sadism.
More so even than gay sadomasochism, lesbian sadomasochism remains
undertheorized, perhaps because it occasions discomfort within feminist circles. On
the one hand, “[b]oth heterosexual women and lesbian S/Mers had been accused of
a similar state of bad faith: the belief was simply that both buy into a system that
perpetuates sadism and masochism in its gendered alignment” (Lynch 41). On the
other hand, “practitioners of lesbian S/M are in a unique position to free up the
terms and collapse and/or re-interpret the binary by staging a theatrical and usually
interchangeable play of roles which inverts the cultural pairing of sadomasochism
with a static (and mythic) heterosexuality” (41). The problem remains, even if the
roles of sadist and masochist are inverted and exchanged, they are based on the
same old (heterosexual) gendered roles. Nonetheless, at least in terms of
sadomasochistic relations within vampire fiction, greater parity exists between
torturer and victim in homosexual vampiric relations than in heterosexual vampiric
relations.
Although the female lacks agency relative to the male within heterosexual
sadomasochistic contractual relations, this is not to say pleasure cannot accrue to
her—it can
Chaline provides a historical overview of homosexual sadomasochism in terms of its theorization and
its actual phases: “(a) leather subculture (1950s-1960s), (b) leather institutions (1970s-1980s), (c)
commercialization of gay SM (1990s), and (d) pluralization of gay SM (late 1990s onward)” (344).
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and it does. Jessica Benjamin notes: ‘‘Cultural myths and labels still do not explain
how the ‘essence of trained femininity’ gets into women’s heads and is there
converted into pleasurable fantasies of erotic submission” (81). It also appears to be
the case that the temporality involved in masochism—the deferment of pleasure
through pain—reinforces and amplifies desire, allowing the masochist “to shatter
the boundaries of the self in order to reemerge with totality in a state of ecstatic
non-identity” (Noble 73). According to Frida Beckman, “[p]leasure is a termination of
desire that effects a reterritorialization, a closing down of desire by subjectification,
but the masochist’s deferral of pleasure through suspension and indefinite
waiting . . . effects a deterritorialization of the subject”; in other words, through
pain, the masochist sustains desire (a form of pleasure in and of itself) and,
paradoxically, “liberates the subject and the body” by removing those restraints
that keep “the subject in place and desire in check” (103). However, considering
many feminists believe women continue to be treated as something less than
subjects within our culture, the so-called liberation of subjectivity on the part of the
female masochist seems to contain inherent drawbacks, particularly due to the
presence of widespread cultural misogyny, which insists women are inherently
inferior to men and they are not subjects in the true sense of the word.
Thus, from a sociocultural standpoint, sadism and misogyny are highly
gendered. Certainly, Freud believed it to be so when he wrote in 1932 that “sadism
has a more intimate relation with masculinity and masochism with femininity, as
though there were a secret kinship present” (as qtd. in Massé 78). Similarly, in 1955,
“Rudolph M. Loewenstein argued that…masochism is much more common in women
than in men” (Beckman 99). But why is this
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so?
At its theoretical core, sadomasochism is founded upon unequal power
relations—or, to put it another way, unequal sexual relations. The same can be said
of patriarchy. Regardless of the scenario, the liaison between torturer (sadist) and
unwilling or willing (masochist) victim produces relative positions of authority (that
is, the sadist has power over the masochist; the masochist’s submission renders her
powerless under the sadist’s dominance). Lynn Chancer, in Sadomasochism in
Everyday Life, affirms and further explicates this relationship by creating three
criteria. The first (and most relevant to my thesis) criterion requires “establishment
of a hierarchical division between self and other that rests on the attribution of
superiority to the sadist and of inferiority to the masochist. The sadist sets up an
unequal relationship with the masochist in which the former is powerful and good,
the latter powerless and bad” (55). Within patriarchal societies, an unequal
relationship between men and women exists, with men predominantly posited as
“powerful” and strong and women as “powerless” and weak. While unequal power
relations between men and women do not necessarily equate to sadomasochistic
relations, they do provide a foundation for such dominant-submissive sexual
behavior.
This leads to another fundamental question: Can pleasure accrue from
sociocultural female masochism? Apparently so. Focusing on the role of gender in
sadomasochistic relationships, Michelle Massé’s In the Name of Love: Women,
Masochism, and the Gothic explores female masochism vis-à-vis the Gothic. Massé
terms masochism “the learned behavior of the oppressed,” which can function “as
the precarious center of a functioning and stable identity,” and she notes
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“masochism emphasizes the self as discrete from others through the distance
between masochist and sadist, a distance bridged only by pain” (45). Similarly,
James Sacksteder writes, a “masochistic identity is a type of negative identity,
which, however costly and pathological, nonetheless represents for some individuals
their best possible effort at creating and maintaining a separate and autonomous
sense of self, one that salvages for them a modicum of satisfaction, security, and
self-esteem” (43). In other words, masochism may offer some victims a way to
adapt and control previous (physical or psychological) trauma through repetition.
Within the gendered binary of victimizer/victim, males act on the instinct for
domination over their masochistic female counterparts, while females attempt to
control and manage the conditions of their victimization. In addition, (pleasurable)
benefits of a sort may be acquired through victimization: the pity and sympathy of
others; the guilt of the torturer; and compensatory rewards (emotional, monetary,
and more) for enduring pain and humiliation. According to Massé, “even the figure
whose position is most troublingly passive, the beaten, is recognized and perhaps
even valued by dint of her very suffering” (47). She adds, while “[t]he sadist learns
that he must get out there and demand his gratification; gender roles teach the
masochist that her influence over others will continue to be through her
helplessness” (49); for example, by “pleasing the beloved, she makes herself
‘indispensable’ and seeks to ‘bind the beloved to [her] through guilt’” (49-50).
The question of whether or not sociocultural misogyny and socially
constructed female masochism influence or otherwise trespass upon the playfulness
of contractual masochism can now be answered. Simply put, there is no way it
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cannot, as contractual agreements, “play,” fantasy, gender, and sexuality are all
socially constructed and linked.
Both types of sadism—sadist/unwilling victim and sadist/willing victim—and
both types of masochism—personally willing and societally compelled—can be
found in vampire literature. All enact different aspects of gender relations within
patriarchal society, and will be discussed within this thesis.
Motifs of Sadomasochism
Sadomasochistic scenarios involve certain specific motifs—childhood beating
fantasies, repetition, and scopophilia/epistemophilia—that also occur in my chosen
sample of vampire fiction. I will discuss each in the following section and employ
them throughout this thesis.
Beating Fantasies
In attempting to reveal the underlying causes of sexual sadomasochism
among adults,
Freud theorizes its origins within a child’s first Oedipal experience. His essay “A Child
is Being
Beaten” dissects childhood beating fantasies and organizes them into three
categories, which Chancer delineates as follows:
(1) a child, not the fantasizer, is being beaten by an unidentified party; (2)
the fantasizing child, herself or himself, is now being beaten by a parent,
usually the father (this stage is generally, though not always, unconscious
and inserted through interpretation by Freud); and (3) a group of children are
being beaten by an amorphous authority figure such as a teacher. Freud’s
explanation is that the child initially wants exclusive love and attention from
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its parents, desires that in the Oedipal phase become sexualized. The child
perceives that the possibility of these desires’ gratification is impeded by
other children, such as siblings, who come to compete for the parents’
affection. (84)
Each of these categories highlights the sadomasochistic dynamic. Because a child
considers her/his siblings and others as rivals for the parents’ or an authority’s love,
this first category in which this child fantasizes about another child being beaten
expresses a sadistic desire; the fantasizer wants another to be beaten because
he/she is in competition for the attention of the figure who holds power. The second
category, however, expresses a masochistic tendency; the fantasizer is, and wants
to be, beaten by an authority figure. Although this authority is not always the father,
this allusion to patriarchy further supports gendered sadism in which a male exerts
power over the masochist. (The third category will be discussed under “The
Spectator,” beginning on page 16).
Massé further interprets the beating fantasy strictly in terms of female
masochism, positing that it can be “understood as not only the persistent
representation of a subordination in which ‘a child is being beaten’ but also as part
of an analytic strategy that situates ‘normal’ feminine passivity—a reluctance to
look, know, or act aggressively—in a pre-Oedipal drama” (42). She restricts the
categories aforementioned to “My father is beating a child,” “My father is beating
me,” and “A child is being beaten” (60), respectively, fantasized by a girl. This
female narration expresses the “need to create/recreate that ‘most momentous’
repressed [second] phase of masochistic feminine desire in which being beaten and
being loved become one and the same” (67). It is this erotic violence interpreted as
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love which generates the daughter’s submission, inscribing gendered roles to beater
and beaten, sadist and masochist, dominator and submissive, powerful and
powerless.
Repetition of Trauma
Repetition is an integral component of masochism. Freud’s essay entitled
“The ‘Uncanny’” discusses the phenomenon of uncanniness, the “class of the
terrifying which leads back to something long known to us as once very familiar” (1-
2). The uncanny, or the German unheimlich, describes that which is unhomely,
“everything that ought to have remained…hidden and secret and has become
visible” (4). Because it evokes the past, the uncanny requires repetition as a
necessary constituent. Freud “postulate[s] the principle of a repetition-compulsion in
the unconscious mind, based upon instinctual activity” (11), and “whatever reminds
us of this inner repetition-compulsion is perceived as uncanny” (12). In the context
of sadomasochism, what is compelled to be repeated is the province of violence and
trauma. Repetition of trauma, then, is an essential aspect of masochism, as
masochism requires submissive reenactment within the sadomasochistic dynamic.
The trauma may have been a specific incident in the masochist’s personal life
or the early trauma of the Oedipal drama and beating fantasy. In any case, the
submissive masochistic role can be reconstructed to exert power over another,
repeating the trauma to recast the masochist into a position of authority. As Freud
notes, “children repeat unpleasurable experiences for the additional reason that
they can master a powerful impression far more thoroughly by being active than
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they could by merely experiencing it passively” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 35).
So too does the masochist/victim repeat a traumatic event in order to master it.
Repeating this trauma becomes a part of the female masochist’s identity, and
“she seeks affirmation of her existence whether through taking up the cross of
martyrdom and assuring that others respond to her passivity and pain…or through
reenactment of sadism” (Massé 51). When the masochist attempts to assert power,
she does so either through the agency of masochism or, alternatively, through the
repetition of her endured trauma in the role of a sadist. By projecting her ingrained
repetition-compulsion onto someone else, “the sadist emerges [from the female
masochist] and the patient acts out the hated tyranny on another helpless victim”
(50), becoming the opposite of Wanda as sadist-turned-masochist.
This inverted structure of the gendered sadomasochistic dynamic counters
the permanence of male sadism and female masochism, but is also a component of
the repetitive nature of trauma that must be acknowledged. It expresses the fluid
nature of sadomasochistic relationships wherein anyone can assume either role, but
female sadism in this context is implied as a result of inscribed male sadism and
female masochism.
Scopophilia and Epistemophilia
Employing Freudian terminology, Massé further develops the position of male
and female characters in the sadomasochistic beating drama in terms of the desire
to see and the desire to perform: “As Freud emphasizes, the urges to look and to
know—what he terms the scopophilic and epistemophilic instincts—are closely
related to one another and to sadism. To look, then, can be to know, to be privy to
the forbidden knowledge that means power” (41). Therefore, “[s]copophilia and
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exhibitionism are the strategies of the beater and the beaten, respectively. The first
reinforces his identity through the aggressive gaze that assaults and appropriates
the other, while the beaten’s main hope for recognition is that she will be pleasing in
the eye of her beholder” (58). Within Freud’s beating fantasy, “in all three cases, it
is the stare the beater trains upon the beaten. The subordinated cannot use it”
(Massé 57). Scopophilia is thus central to the beating fantasy as the beater is also
the gazer, and, again, the female’s “reluctance to look, know, or act aggressively,”
her “active drives, rechanneled through passive, inward-turning routes” in the
beating fantasy “will pave the way for the masochistic, exhibitionist woman who is
supposed to be blind to the forbidden knowledge that shapes her
life” (42).
Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny’” also affirms males as the gazers, employing
biology in the context of looking. The male’s emphasis on eyes, the organs by which
one looks, is indirectly linked to power, and the lack thereof seen as castration: “a
morbid anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a
substitute for the dread of castration” (7). Thus, genitals and optics are aligned;
there is a “substitutive relation between the eye and the male member” (7), which
generates an analogous relationship between looking and gender: To have eyes is to
see is to know is to be a male is to have a penis/the Lacanian phallus is to have
power. Voyeuristic scopophilia, elaborated upon in the following pages, and
epistemophilia are essentially assigned as characteristics of the male sex, relegating
the female sex to other side of the binary—the looked-at and known. Laura Mulvey
reiterates this conjecture within sadomasochism by acknowledging “circumstances
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in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there
is pleasure in being looked at” (2184), dictated and assumed by gender.
The Spectator
While much energy is spent on theorizing power roles of the sadomasochistic
couple, it is necessary to acknowledge an invisible third party in the arena of
sadomasochistic literature and film. In addition to the sadist and masochist, there is
the audience; we, as readers of these texts, both observe instances of
sadomasochism and imbibe their gendered dynamic. We are socialized by popular
culture to behave a certain way; the culture itself is patriarchal and, one might
argue, sadomasochistic. Massé argues “women are taught masochism through
fiction and culture” (3), and it is in the Gothic, for example, where this submissive
tendency is propagated and perpetuated. Within “sadomasochistic fantasies…we
can discern the ‘pure culture’ of domination—a dynamic which organizes both
domination and submission” (Benjamin 52), and these fantasies are enacted by and
within the culture to which the spectator belongs.
Within the triangular Freudian beating fantasy, there is a distance between
the narrator and the drama unfolding; the first and third categories in which another
is being beaten position the fantasizer as a spectator: “The last [category], with its
erasure of recognizable actors and its shift from active to passive voice, establishes
the spectator as consciously related to neither beaten nor beater” (Massé 60), yet
at other times, “the shifting identification of the spectator with the beaten or beater
marks a further risk: those who are beaten may, in their turn, replicate oppression”
(61). As a result, both literature and spectator feed off one another to construct,
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reconstruct, enact, and reenact the culture of sadomasochism and the gender
binaries involved.
The spectator’s role in the sadomasochistic triad is pivotal to explaining the
sadist’s “aggressive will-to-narrate and will-to-uncover” (Sedgwick 114). In terms of
the audience or the reader as spectator, the active exploration of narratives and
their components position the viewer/reader in a sadistic role. As readers, we are
distanced from the story itself, yet, like the sadist, exert power in uncovering events
as they occur by looking, literally at the page and metaphorically as an invincible
and remote gazer of the story, and knowing the constituents of the narrative itself.
Like the sadistic spectator of the first beating fantasy, the scopophilic/epistemophilic
utilizes vision/learning to gain sight/knowledge and control the spectacle.
Mulvey applies the spectator’s gaze to film in her essay “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema.” She argues film exhibits the “unconscious of patriarchal society”
(2182) through the convention of a “woman on-screen typically function[ing] as the
primary erotic object for both screen characters and audience members, becoming
the object of the dominant, male gaze” (2180). The audience identifies with the
powerful male protagonist of the story, whose “scopophilia (pleasure in looking)”
reflects our “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and
curious gaze” (2184). Here, scopophilia is deconstructed into gendered binaries:
active/male and passive/female, or active/passive and male/female. As Mulvey
suggests, “[i]n their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked
at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact
that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (2186). Female
exhibitionism, woman existing as the image to be viewed, then, implies a
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submission on her part, a staged masochism to the male’s and spectator’s sadistic
gaze.
In explicating the masculine escape from anxiety caused by castration—the
loss of the penis or phallus, thus male power—inflicted by females, Mulvey cites two
tendencies of looking. One, “fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of
the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself” (2188), though
stripped of its threat. The other, “voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with
sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt
(immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjugating the
guilty person [the woman] through punishment or forgiveness,” and results from
“preoccupation with the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her
mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty
object” (2188). While Mulvey delineates the two, I will use the term scopophilia in
relation to the latter definition, or voyeurism, as it pertains most to sadomasochism
and the gaze.
What does this say about females looking/reading, if we are the spectators of
these patriarchal sadomasochistic dramas? Because we, who are women, are active
gazers at exhibitionist erotic objects, what is the role of the female as spectator?
Massé addresses this dilemma:
“The lack of authority in women’s looking is not, however, reason to conclude
that we do not see, nor even that patriarchy does not allow or requires that
we see….The looking that we do is a good place to seek out cracks in
[masculinist] power […]” Thus, the gaze of the subordinated is a potential
means to identify and reconstruct patterns of domination. (59)
19
Females as active witnesses to and learners of male sadism and female masochism
may look at and know texts in order to restructure unequal power dynamics. They
may identify with the male sadist, but they may also see themselves in the figure of
the female masochist. Females may learn to act out the sadomasochistic narratives
presented to them, or they may, through observation, learn these narratives are
flawed, oppressive, debilitating. This thesis will be an attempt to widen these cracks
for readers of gendered and sadomasochistic vampire literature.
The Gothic
Though the machinery is invention, and the names of the
actors imaginary, I cannot but believe that the ground-work
of the story is founded on truth.
Horace Walpole
“Preface to the First Edition,” The Castle of Otranto
The Gothic as Cultural Expression
Gothic literature originated in the eighteenth century and is characterized by
the transgressive, the uncanny, the uncomfortable, and the fear-inducing: “Gothic
atmospheres— gloomy and mysterious—have repeatedly signaled the disturbing
return of pasts upon presents and evoked emotions of terror and laughter” (Botting
1). Since the genre’s creation with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764),
the Gothic narrative has appropriated “presentations of supernatural, sensational
and terrifying incidents, imagined or not” (4) to express and transgress “cultural
anxieties” (2) concerning the self and society. As Fred Botting notes, the Gothic’s
“images of dark power and mystery evoked fear and anxiety” (9) about “criminal
behavior, violent executions of selfish ambition and voracious passion and licentious
20
enactments of carnal desire” (6), transgressing acceptable cultural behaviors and
norms. In other words, the Gothic is the perfect literary genre in which to explore
issues regarding gender and sexuality.
The Gothic as originally conceived and as it continues to exist owes much to
the aesthetic theories of Edmund Burke, as articulated in his treatise A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke
gendered the sublime as masculine and the beautiful as feminine, providing the
parameters by which terror and horror are inspired. In 1826, Ann Radcliffe published
an essay entitled “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” in which she further explicated
the differences between terror and horror: “Terror and horror are so far opposite,
that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life;
the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them” (6). Terror resides in
“uncertainty and obscurity” (6)—by engendering mystery, positing secrets—and it
“expands the soul” of the reader through curiosity, a desire to know more, to have
the mysteries solved and the secrets revealed. In contrast, horror “freezes” the
faculties through the explicit depiction of acts of violence, debauchery, cruelty; the
soul contracts in horror. (Think of the difference between a Hitchcock movie and a
slasher/splatter movie.) In the earliest stages of the Gothic, terror was the province
of women writers; horror, the province of males.
Although both terror-based and horror-based Gothic novels (then and now)
explore sadomasochistic gender relations, most often the terror-based Gothic results
in a pleasing denouement, wherein the sadistic sublime villain is defeated
(preferably killed), while the innocent and beautiful heroine receives her just reward.
The horror-based Gothic generally results in unpleasant endings, but most
21
particularly for the heroine, who may be raped or murdered, or who, as happens
with the “final girl,” remains the sole survivor of a bloody massacre.
Terror typically combines with horror in vampire fiction. Vampires are
mysterious to humans; their secrets require revelation, but only with some teasing
foreplay. However, part of the vampire’s allure is his (or her) transgressiveness,
particularly in terms of sexuality, and the best way to demonstrate this is through
horrific scenes that both shock and titillate. It might easily be argued the more
explicitly sadomasochistic the gender relations depicted within the text, the closer
the alliance to horror, as sadism and masochism, by their very natures, require
illustration, as Deleuze suggests.
Through the genre of the Gothic, “[t]hreats are spiced with thrills, terrors with
delights, horrors with pleasures” (Botting 9), evincing a sadomasochistic-esque
structure in which
“Gothic terrors and horrors emanate from readers’ identifications with heroes and
heroines” (7). The spectator is again alluded to, as the Gothic provides “objects of
terror and horror [that] not only provoke repugnance, disgust and recoil, but also
engage readers’ interest, fascinating and attracting them” (9). Readers and Gothic
literature thus symbiotically construct and enact one another, spectators vicariously
existing through the protagonist (or antagonist) and transgressing societal rules
through the text’s expression of cultural fears. Within the genre of the Gothic,
whether it be a book, a play, or film, the reader or viewer becomes the third
member of the sadomasochistic triangle—the spectator.
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Gender and the Gothic
Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778) was the second Gothic novel to
be penned, and it was written as a direct challenge of and corrective to Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto. Since that time, women authors have, if not dominated the
Gothic genre, at least contributed to it on a scale equal to or greater than their male
counterparts. The attraction of the Gothic for women writers and for feminist
scholars has largely been due to the ability of the Gothic to question and
exaggerate cultural norms, as Botting notes: “A challenge to or interrogation of
forms of fiction dominated by patriarchal assumptions, Gothic novels have been
reassessed as part of a wider feminist critical movement that recovers suppressed
or marginalised writing by women and addresses issues of female experience,
sexual oppression and difference” (19).
Born in the same year The Castle of Otranto was published, Ann Radcliffe was
one of the first female writers of Gothic fiction—and the most popular Gothic author
of her lifetime. Exploiting elements of the Gothic pertaining to women’s
victimization in a terrifying patriarchy, she was a/the progenitor of what Ellen Moers
termed the Female Gothic, “the work that women writers have done in the literary
mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic” (90). The
Female Gothic is characterized by a female protagonist; by a happy ending; by
terror rather than horror; and by mysteries caused by human, rather than
supernatural, agency. In contrast, the Male Gothic most normally lays claim to a
male protagonist, an unhappy ending, an emphasis on horror, and extensive use of
the supernatural. Within both variations (and not all male authors write Male Gothics
23
and not all female authors write Female Gothics), sadomasochistic gender relations
are displayed. Yet, within the Male
Gothic, sadomasochism is explicitly depicted in depraved sexual acts, whereas in
the Female Gothic, sadomasochism is a fact of everyday life, with males dominating
females and with rape an ever-present possibility, which the enterprising heroine
nonetheless manages to avoid.
Within the Female Gothic, “female characters are depicted as constantly
struggling against powerful forces that they think are real and that they believe are
poised to destroy them” (Hoeveler 8); members of a “male-created system of
oppression and corruption…women [are] the innocent prey of a corrupt and evil
patriarchal system” (9). Massé argues that, typical of Gothic narratives, “the silence,
immobility, and enclosure of the heroines mark their internalization of repression as
well as the power of the repressing force” (18), a thought seconded by Diane
Hoeveler. Gothic literature (by both male and female authors) highlights this
gendered binary of active victimizer/passive victim. Massé interprets this passive
victimization as female masochism, engendered by societal forces: “When a woman
is hurt, as she is throughout the Gothic, the damage is not originally self-imposed:
we must acknowledge that someone else strikes the first blow…The Gothic, then is
a pointed reminder of cultural amnesia in its insistent representation of the process
through which a woman becomes a masochist and assigns subjectivity to another”
(3).
Reiterating the centrality of the reader in literary reality, Massé contends the
female reader/spectator identifies, at least in part, with the fictional female
victim/protagonist, becoming the spectator who recognizes herself as potential
24
victim: “[E]very female reader of the Gothic is such a spectator, whether or not she
acknowledges her uncomfortable affinity with the victim and her own risk” (40).
Because the Gothic is a projection of gender roles and societal anxieties, the
spectator reflects the text. What does the Gothic teach its readers in this case,
then? As Massé notes, “[g]irls who, seeking recognition and love, learn to forget or
deny that they also wanted independence and agency, grow up to become women
who are Gothic heroines” (3). Many female characters within the Gothic genre are
structured by the patriarchal realm in which they inhabit, exhibiting in many cases
passivity and powerlessness which are in turn imbibed by readers; this is most often
the case, though it does not have to be the case.
Sadomasochism and the Gothic
Given the trope of the marginalized heroine in a patriarchal culture, the
Gothic aptly embodies the sadomasochistic male/female binary. Mark Edmundson’s
Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic
defines the Gothic in terms of the “pleasures of the sadomasochistic encounter”:
“For at the core of every Gothic plot is the S & M scenario: victim, victimizer, terrible
place, torment” (133). The Gothic narrative provides a framework in which gendered
power roles are cast, and “the self is defined through conflict, as a giver or receiver
of pain in a sadomasochistic dynamic” (Massé 53). Additionally, the enamored
female protagonist of the Gothic plot enters “the Gothic’s arena of loving cruelty
[which] points to the ubiquitous strength of the social and psychological linkage of
love and dominance” (Massé 231). Gothic heroines imbibe and enact female
victimization in a dominating, patriarchal culture through the assumption of a
masochistic role when confronted with a male figure.
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Sadomasochism’s repeated trauma, scopophilia/epistemophilia, and the
beating fantasy along gendered lines also characterize the Gothic: “The Gothic plot
is…a repetition and exploration of the traumatic denial of identity found there”
(Massé 18), and “the heroine of marital Gothic will always reawaken to the still-
present actuality of her trauma, because the gender expectations that deny her
identity are woven into the very fabric of her culture, which perpetuates her trauma
while denying its existence” (15). Edmundson applies the spectator and scopophilia
to the Gothic, although he suggests the projection of ourselves onto both the male
sadist and the female masochist, rather than just the masochist: “[W]e take
pleasure in identifying our pleasures with those of the Gothic hero-villain, the sadist;
we take pleasure in becoming, in fantasy, the Gothic victim, the heroine” (132).
Although Edmundson’s analysis of the spectator complicates the gendered
dichotomies proposed by Massé and Mulvey, his acknowledgment supports
scopophilia’s presence in the Gothic. The masochistic female and her relived trauma
inflicted by the male sadist, gazed at by a participating audience, are thus central to
both the Gothic and sadomasochism.
The Sadistic Vampire and the Masochistic Human
I suppose that you’ll get your way . . . whether it kills you or not.
Stephenie Meyer
Twilight
Gothic terror and horror manifest respectively in the unknown and the
supernatural. Fanged, nocturnal, and uncanny, vampires have become a staple of
Gothic fiction. Familiar yet foreign, they have been lethal incarnations of popular
26
culture’s most seductive nightmares since their first appearance in the early
nineteenth century. Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves analyzes vampire
narratives, from Byron’s “Fragment” to Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles series,
highlighting societal implications of each vampiric figure. Masquerading as humans
and, indeed, reflecting back an only slightly exaggerated depiction of human nature,
“vampires blend into the changing cultures they inhabit” (6), immortal yet dynamic
throughout their literary evolution. Just as the “Gothic became part of an
internalised world of guilt, anxiety, despair, a world of individual [and collective]
transgression interrogating the uncertain bounds of imaginative freedom and
human knowledge” (Botting 10), vampires as Gothic products are “reconfigured in
different cultural contexts to embody what is feared and desired, and feared just
because it is desired” (Wisker 177).
Others yet ourselves, vampires violate social boundaries codifying sexuality
and gender politics “by denying the constraints of our lives as they fulfill both the
terrors (devouring and death) and the promises (undying love and life) of popular
myths and fictions” (Wisker 175). Through miscegenation with virginal human
women, for example, Victorian vampires dismantled the chastity of the angel in the
house. John Allen Stevenson’s “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula”
observes a vampiric inversion of human sexuality, both transgressing and mirroring
our own behaviors: “Although the vampire reproduces differently, the ironic thing
about vampire sexuality is that, for all its overt peculiarity, it is in many ways very
like human sexuality, but human sexuality in which the psychological or metaphoric
becomes physical or literal” (142). As the Gothic mirrors through a glass darkened
by cultural fears, the vampire’s visage defies reflection. However, “[w]hen we say
27
that the vampire is absent from the mirror, perhaps what we are saying is that we
are afraid to see a reflection— however uneasy and strange—of ourselves” (147),
Stevenson notes.
This thesis will analyze relationships between vampires themselves and
humans, using two contemporary popular series (by two female writers),
investigating the significance of these relationships and their deeper meanings for
the societally-situated spectator. While a “hating, needing companionship between
men” (Auerbach 16) produced the Byronic or Romantic-era vampire, “the figure of
the vampire in women’s writing by Rice, Brite and others actually alters the
meanings and relationships of vampires, particularly vampire women, to radical and
liberating effect” (Wisker 175). Examining these relationships will lend itself to
analysis of the culture we currently inhabit, as “vampires have been our companions
for so long that it is hard to imagine living without them” (Auerbach 9).
Vampires, Gender, and Sadomasochism, Oh My!: Review of
Literature The seminal book of vampire scholarship, written from the perspective
that vampires really do exist, is Montague Summer’s The Vampire: His Kith and Kin
(1928). Since then, and particularly within the last thirty years, intense interest in
vampires has generated a plethora of scholarly studies of literary and filmic
vampires—too much to cover reasonably within the scope of my thesis. My
intention is to review only those works relevant to this project—that is,
scholarship addressing vampires, gender, and/or sadomasochism in the primary
texts selected for this thesis.
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Interview with the Vampire
While most scholarship written on Rice’s series predates the twenty-first
century, when the series was most popular, it remains applicable to my thesis.
Janice Doane’s and Devon
Hodges’s article “Undoing Feminism: From the Preoedipal to Postfeminism in Anne
Rice's Vampire Chronicles” explores the series from a feminist perspective, viewing
Rice as perpetuating patriarchal gender politics. Shakira Hoosain’s dissertation “In
the Shadow of the Night: The Gendered Subtext of Anne Rice’s Vampire
Chronicles” also reads the Vampire Chronicles in the same vein, emphasizing the
series’ conservative subtext despite its superficial sexual transgression.
Additionally, James Keller’s book Anne Rice and Sexual Politics analyzes the
vampire family’s Oedipal and Electra complexes, and reads the series as
homophobic and heterosexist. Lorna Jowett’s article “‘Mute and Beautiful’: The
Representation of the Female in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire”
particularly notes Claudia’s oppression throughout the novel.
This series’ popularity will be examined also through Keller’s reading, which
addresses Rice’s vampires’ metaphorical embodiment of AIDS paranoia in the
1980s. With a more expansive audience than Twilight in terms of gender, Rice’s
The Vampire Chronicles series is viewed comparatively with Meyer’s Twilight
series regarding their respective classification as adult and young adult literature,
in Melissa Ames’s article “Vamping up Sex: Audience, Age, & Portrayals of
Sexuality in Vampire Narratives.”
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Twilight Series
Meyer’s series has received much more critical investigation than Rice’s.
Tison Pugh’s “Masochistic Abstinence, Bug Chasing, and the Erotic Death Drive in
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series” recognizes Bella’s masochism, yet also
interprets Edward as a masochist rather than as “a cruel sadist [who] wields erotic
authority” (143). Contrary to Pugh’s account, but advocating my position, Anthea
Taylor and Frann Michel read Bella’s and Edward’s relationship as
sadomasochistic. Employing psychoanalytic feminist theory, Taylor’s article “‘The
urge towards love is an urge towards (un)death’: Romance, Masochistic Desire and
Postfeminism in the Twilight novels” explores Bella’s submission to Edward in the
same vein as Massé’s female masochism. Although she mentions Edward’s sadism
as an aside, focusing predominately on Bella’s role, Taylor interrogates the series’
patriarchal codes and why “a masochistic relationship and an undead subjectivity
for a teenage girl are seen as utopic sites of possibility in these narratives” (31).
Such a utopia is the focus of Michel’s “How to Bring Your
Kids Up Sadomasochist: Intimate-partner Violence and the Twilight Phenomenon,”
examining implications of the Twilight franchise’s popularity. Emphasizing the role of
the spectator, in this case teenage girls, Michel acknowledges Twilight’s
sadomasochistic relationships and discusses them as a “romanticized portrait of
intimate-partner violence” (1). Her article supports my analysis of gendered
sadomasochism, diving deeper, albeit briefly, into the significance of
reading/watching and reenacting texts.
Coined by Maggie Parke and Natalie Wilson in Theorizing Twilight: Critical
Essays on What’s at Stake in a Post-Vampire World, the term “post-Vampires”
30
describe those “that re-work traditional conceptions of this supernatural figure” (3).
Countering conventional vampiric transgression, Twilight’s vampires conform to
culturally conservative mores—heterosexual married monogamy, sexual abstinence
before marriage, and traditional male and female gender roles—adhering to social
codes rather than upsetting them: “The vampire story is no longer a cautionary tale
against seduction and evil; instead it is another romance with a few more obstacles
to overcome…there is now a generation that views vampire characters not as
terrifying and evil, but as romantic and compassionate” (Groper 145); Edward in
sparkly shirtless-ness has become the new romantic hero.
For the conclusion of this thesis, essays on readers’ response to the series will
be employed. Surveying a sample of Twilight fans, Ananya Mukherjea’s essay “Team
Bella: Fans Navigating Desire, Security, and Feminism” analyzes readers’ responses
to the series. Readers perceive Edward’s paternal protection as desirable, and
employ scopophilia themselves to gaze at Bella’s love interests. Additionally, a
study conducted by Melissa Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Elizabeth Behm-
Morawitz similarly found Edward’s and Bella’s relationship as the most desirable of
all Twilight relationships (versus Jasper-Alice, Carlisle-Esme, and Jacob-Bella
couplings) for both teen and adult readers, particularly because most respondents
prefer their partner to be “protective, possessive, chivalrous, and intensely attracted
to them” (151). Unfortunately, Bella’s and Edward’s damaging and dangerous
sexual intercourse is also desired by fans, its sadomasochistic implications
attractive for readers, as reflected in E. L. James’s erotic BDSM series.
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Methodology
I will employ Freudian psychoanalysis and feminist theory in my analysis of
gender and sadomasochistic relationships within the specified works of vampire
literature. Both theoretical frameworks will structure my thesis around the
implications of these texts’ popularity within the culture to which they belong.
Feminism’s emphasis on a history of phallocentrism draws much from
psychoanalysis, deconstructing and reconstructing Freud’s misogynist essentialism.
Because Second Wave feminism often invokes the sexual difference and
unconscious drives of psychoanalysis in its explication of patriarchy and female
subordination, so the two will be paired in my dissection of sadomasochism.
Massé, Mulvey, and Hoeveler read or view texts through a feminist lens that
critiques the structures of patriarchy, supporting my general positioning of males as
powerful and females as powerless within a sadomasochistic dynamic (although,
admittedly, some relationships subvert this gendered structure). Tying feminism to
the Gothic, Massé also advocates that “[p]sychoanalysis helps us to understand the
Gothic’s emphasis upon masochism as a key issue in feminine identity” (2). Freud’s
particular concepts of scopophilia/epistemophilia and the beating fantasy will also
frame my analyses of the literature read vis-à-vis feminism and sadomasochism.
Moers’s concept of the Female Gothic further lends haunted heroines and vampires,
products of the Gothic, to a feminist interpretation. As Wisker writes, vampires “are
our others, and ourselves, and in their contemporary feminist reincarnations they
afford us a wealth of insights into what it means to be human” (177), subject to or
exerting power, objects of or aroused by (erotic) desire.
32
Chapter Outline
Chapter One: Interview with the Vampire
Anne Rice resurrects the aristocratic vampire in twentieth-century America,
reincarnating the myth through the popular series The Vampire Chronicles. Focusing
on the series’ first installment, Interview with the Vampire, this chapter begins by
looking at two minor characters who respectively enact the “classic” roles of
unwilling sadistic victim and willing masochistic victim. Specifically, the nightly
performances at the Théâtre des Vampires require sadistic vampires and an
unwilling victim; in one explicit scene from the novel, an unknown woman victim is
stripped naked, then “raped” and murdered by two powerful male vampires, much
to the titillation of the audience. In addition, “contractual” or mutually consenting
sadomasochism is enacted in the relationship between the vampire Armand and his
willing male slave. I then read the pairings of Lestat/Louis and Armand/Louis in
terms of the gendered sadomasochistic model, Louis the feminized masochist to the
more masculine sadist—Lestat often acts in sadistic ways, emotionally torturing
Louis by killing those humans whom Louis loves or wants to save, and Armand acts
as puppeteer despite Louis’s love, precisely because he kills Claudia, Louis’s
daughter/lover. I then explore the triangular relations among Louis de Pointe du Lac,
Lestat de Lioncourt, and the child vampire Claudia. The homo-/heteroerotic bond in
the familial triad is confusingly Oedipal, blurring lines of gender and sexuality that
either transgress or affirm patriarchal codes. However, homosocial relationships
between men in Rice’s fiction are privileged over their female counterparts,
continuing a patriarchal narrative. The chapter concludes with an examination of the
33
childwoman and monstrous-feminine Claudia, who disturbingly literalizes the
infantilization and unjust punishment of women within patriarchal culture.
Chapter Two: Twilight Series
Once dangerous, stealthy, bloodlusting, today’s vampires have incarnated
into a sparkly, vegetarian, passive-aggressive manifestation of the masochistic
female’s Prince Charming. Revamping the vampire myth for an adolescent
audience, the Twilight series romanticizes the traditional relationship between
humans and vampires, the revenant other falling in love with, rather than
consuming, its prey. Stephenie Meyer’s four-volume series
(Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn) is the most popular of twenty-
first-century vampire literature, spawning a high-grossing film and merchandise
franchise. In this chapter, I begin by examining the violent nature of love and
romantic relationships, as articulated through Bella Swan’s amorous encounters
with Edward Cullen, a vampire, and Jacob Black, a pseudowerewolf. Although
founded on a mutual love and generally devoid of sex, the relationship between
helpless Gothic heroine Bella Swan and “good” vampire Edward Cullen is
sadomasochistic. The series’ rigid binarisms insist on a repeated structure of
vampiric power and human weakness, exacerbated by the gendered polarities of
male dominance and female submission.
I argue Meyer’s novels promote rape culture and violence against women, as
Bella is repeatedly hurt by or because of Edward and Jacob, and she also hurts
herself because of Edward. Next, I examine Edward’s scopophilia/epistemophilia in
relation to Bella’s exhibitionism. While Edward is absent, Bella inverts her
34
masochism and utilizes sadism; Jacob, enemy of the Cullens, falls in love with
sadistic Bella and triangulates the love story. However, this is only temporary as
Bella’s naturalized role is that of masochist. Bella as a vampire finally achieves
agency, yet it is problematic—she gains power as both wife and mother, and still
her vampiric power is that of altruistic protection. The chapter concludes with an
investigation into the series’ highly problematic infantilization of women and
sexualization of female children. Bella’s helplessness renders her an emotional and
physical infant; the quickly growing
Renesmee—the half-vampire, half-human daughter of Bella and Edward—becomes
the love object of Jacob Black at six months of age, with the text implying that she
will marry him once she reaches physical maturation (and presumably sexual
maturation) at age seven.
Afterward/Afterword
In the conclusion of this thesis, I examine how these texts both articulate and
inscribe certain types of cultural values, which, in turn, the reader resists or imbibes.
While Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, originally published in 1976, may be
read as a plea for gender tolerance and as a metaphorical examination of the AIDS
epidemic, it might also be read as homophobic/heterosexist and misogynistic.
Stephenie Meyer’s twenty-first-century Twilight series clearly argues for
heteronormative, hyper-conservative, traditional gender roles and monogamous
relationships, yet readers view Edward as doting and Bella as heroic.
35
Chapter One: A Good Woman is Hard to Find Privileging Male
Homosocial Relations in Interview with the Vampire
Then are you the master of us all? You didn’t teach her
that.
Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet
subservience?
Anne Rice
Interview with the Vampire
Harkening back to Polidori’s wealthy Lord Ruthven and Stoker’s noble Count
Dracula, Anne Rice resurrects the aristocratic revenant in her The Vampire
Chronicles series. Written in interview format and narrated by Louis Pointe du Lac,
Interview with the Vampire—the first book in the series—humanizes the historically
abject and Othered monster. Consequently, Rice “was possibly the first writer to
narrate her stories in the first person from the vampire’s point of view” (Gelder
109), characterizing the melancholic hero Louis as a sympathetic vampire more
aligned with James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney (1847). Indeed, Louis resents his
forced vampirization by Lestat de Lioncourt and attempts to curb his appetite for
human blood by subsisting on rats. In other words, Rice’s novel vampiric hero
returns to older models of literary vampires, yet he also presages the twenty-first-
century “vegetarian” vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.
Rice’s novel centers on a number of relationships—pairs and trios—between
and among males and females, and Rice’s complicated erotics (homo-, hetero-,
pedophilic, and incestuous) attest to the vampiric figure’s cultural transgression.
Despite these controversial and more progressive expressions of sexuality,
however, Rice articulates—consciously or not—a story embedded within misogynist
patriarchal power structures: “The abuse of power for which the vampire is a
36
metaphor thus includes abuse of women both as property and as tools in men's
efforts to control and abuse other men” (Johnson 76). Lestat and Louis assume
traditional malefemale gender roles, their vampire child is simultaneously
sexualized and infantilized as a woman-child, male characters are consistently
privileged over females, and women exist as mere pawns in men’s chess game of
homosocial and homoerotic relations.
This chapter opens with an analysis of the vampire/human sadist/masochist
dyad, as depicted through two minor characters—both human—and their
relationships with vampires; notably, the two human victims—one female, one male
—present contrasting responses to their vampiric torturer: The female is (initially)
unwilling, succumbing only when she realizes death is inevitable; the male, willing
even unto death. Next, the homosocial/homosexual pairings of Lestat/Louis and
Armand/Louis are examined via sadomasochistic theory. Although all three
vampires are anatomically male, I argue Louis assumes a more feminine and
masochistic role with his more masculine and sadistic lovers Lestat and Armand.
When the screenplay for the filmic version of Interview with the Vampire was being
written, Rice desired a woman to be cast for his character, essentially classifying
Louis as a female and even identifying with him: “It’s all the same passivity, the
same philosophical ideas, the same inability to fight Lestat's domination. It’s fine
for Louis to be a woman because he is a woman—he's really me” (as qtd. in
Ramsland
152, 269). I then read Louis as mother and Lestat as father when they vampirize
the five-year-
old orphan Claudia, and I discuss how the triangulated relationship among Lestat,
Louis, and Claudia enacts the beating fantasy and Oedipal and Electra complexes.
37
The introduction of Claudia further relates a patriarchal narrative in which women
are used by men and objectified by the male gaze, only to be killed by their
oppressors for transgressing paternal law. Because female relationships are
relegated to the periphery, this chapter concludes with the fatal futility of
intercepting male homosocial bonds through monstrous femininity.
Vampire Sadism/Human Masochism
Would you put it past them to have human
slaves?
Anne Rice
Interview with the Vampire
Louis’s reluctance to kill humans for sustenance is a component of his
characterization as a sympathetic vampire, and, consequently, he is the only
undead predator in Interview with the Vampire who resists the explicated
dichotomy of sadistic vampire/masochistic human. Indeed, Armand of the Parisian
Théâtre des Vampires and Lestat de Lioncourt insist upon the enactment and
enforcement of these dichotomous roles through the repeated cat-and-mouse
victimization of female and male humans. In keeping with a patriarchal narrative,
Rice dangles her helpless female prey in front a troupe of thespian vampires for a
staged play, and such histrionics are exacerbated with the added scopophilic
element of a sadistic, gluttonous, sexually stimulated audience. Armand, the
group’s ancient leader, also keeps an adolescent male slave, though it is important
to acknowledge that this boy is a willing victim and derives sexual pleasure from
his masochism. Equally important is the collective sadism enacted with these
victims—both the girl and boy are feasted upon by the vampire troupe. Their
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victimization is individual yet their victimizers are communal. Perhaps this is
indicative of sadomasochism as a sociocultural phenomenon, shared among a
cannibalistic group of people. Other minor characters who assume the role of
masochist are the interviewer recording Louis’s narrative and Lestat’s musician
lover, though their masochism manifests itself in less disparate power parameters,
and, as such, is not discussed in as great a depth.
The Sadean Female Victim
When Louis first encounters vampires—Santiago and Armand—in Paris, he
and Claudia are invited to the opulent and secret Théâtre des Vampires. Clearly
catering to the monied elite, the theater presents nightly plays in which vampires
play the part of actors playing the part of vampires. Onto the stage each night, an
unknowing and unwilling human victim is lured to her death. Here, the power play
between bloodthirsty, seductive vampires and defenseless, succumbing humans is
enacted/acted for a privileged, paying mortal public, which does not realize what it
witnesses is more than an erotic staged display, but rather vampiric feeding. The
play Louis and Claudia attend insidiously casts a male vampire—Santiago—in the
role of grim reaper, with a beautiful young woman as his victim. This scene is
perhaps the most overt expression of sadism (and, eventually, masochism) in
Interview with the Vampire, and it begins in classic Sadean style, with Death
(Santiago) as the torturer intent on sadistically toying with— and then killing—his
unwilling victim.
Santiago is “Death standing before the audience, the scythe poised, Death at
the edge of a dark wood” (215), whose victim is an anonymous “young woman…
majestically tall and all but enshrined by a voluminous mane of golden blond hair”
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(217). Louis explicitly notes her mortality and naïveté, her helpless human
difference:
And she was lost; and not a vampire. The soil on her mean blouse and skirt
was not stage paint, and nothing had touched her perfect face, which gazed
into the light now, as beautiful and finely chiseled as the face of a marble
Virgin, that hair her haloed veil. She could not see in the light, though all
could see her…she was very like a child, though clearly a full-grown woman.
(217-8)
Like a deer in headlights, the child-woman is unaware of her surroundings and
does not yet know her lethal fate, though the audience surely anticipates the
expected outcome of this “play”—her vulnerable naked body and her ultimate
staged “death.” (Remember the audience does not know—or is unwilling to admit it
knows—the victim literally dies at the end). Dressed as and assuming the airs of a
gentleman, Death courts the young woman:
Death showed a beaming white face to the audience, his hurried hands
stroking his handsome black hair, straightening a waistcoat, brushing
imaginary dust from his lapels. Death in love. And clapping rose for the
luminous countenance, the gleaming cheekbones, the winking black eye, as
if it were all masterful illusion when in fact it was merely and certainly the
face of a vampire…that leering, grinning vampire. (217)
While the vampire is depicted as a charming suitor, the woman is infantilized,
further connoting their roles as vampire and human in terms of gender while
alluding to the scene’s faux façade of erotic foreplay.
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Foreshadowing the impending feeding as a representation of gang rape,
Death is joined by six other vampires, notably an equal number of women and men.
While Death was at first strictly male, it now becomes collective and bisexual: “‘We
are death’” (219). However, though this gendered grouping is characteristic of
Rice’s homoerotic vampires, it is also necessary to clarify that they are, in fact, first
led by a “tall, malevolent leader vampire, that demon trickster” (219), Santiago,
and, next, by Armand. After Armand has first fed upon the female victim, she then
is given to the other vampires, both male and female, “as she was passed from one
to another to another” (223). Although comprised of both male and female
predators, the group’s obedience to male authority affirms the heterosexual
male/female sadomasochistic dyad. In addition, the women vampires are merely
auxiliary characters, both within the setting of the play and within scheme of the
novel itself, while Santiago takes on a more active role in the play (as Death) and
within the novel (as Louis’s tormentor), and Armand is an integral presence in the
play itself (he truly is Death, as he gives the fatal bite), the novel (he is leader of
the Parisian vampires and Louis’s love interest), and within the Vampire Chronicles
as a series (with the entire sixth novel dedicated to his story).
One of the more interesting aspects of the staged scene at the Théâtre des
Vampires is the young woman’s transformation from unwilling to willing victim,
from victim of sadism to masochistic victim. Once the six other vampires join
Santiago as Death, the young woman knows she will soon die. “‘I don’t want to
die…’ she whispered” (218), then, almost immediately after, she screams, “‘I don’t
want to die. I don’t want to’” (219), refusing to submit to her fate. Instead, she
desperately entreats the audience to save her, but, perceiving this as part of the
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staged drama, audience members watch silently. Santiago sadistically toys with
her, attempting to gain her submission by engaging her in a debate about death’s
inevitability, all the while undoing the strings that hold her blouse up. She becomes
“baffled, outsmarted, helpless” (220). Her breasts now bared to the “titillated
crowd” (220), the scared woman begins crying, knowing full well escape is
impossible and she must suffer: Louis remarks, “her pain bathed her in a
beauteous light, a light which made her irresistibly alluring. It was this that held
the jaded audience, this terrible pain…She had no chance” (221). It should be
noted, at this point, the pain is psychological and emotional, rather than physical.
In response to Death’s romantic overtures and his proclamations wherein she
should submit to death and become his “bride” (221), she begins to “d[ie] inside,
weakening” (220), but nonetheless continues to remain hopeful, leaving him
“frustrated” and “struggling” (221) to control the scripted play. Her fear,
resignation, and submission are what Death in the form of sadistic Santiago
requires.
The situation changes once Armand appears on the stage and offers her
death with “‘No pain’” (221); she suddenly transforms into a willing victim,
“yearning towards him…dying now, under this vampire’s power…and she was
giving herself over” (222). She actually melts into Armand, throwing her arms
around his neck like a lover, while Armand consummates his bloodlust for the
audience in the play’s pornographic final act: “And now, turning her slowly to the
side so that they could all see her serene face, he was lifting her, her back arching
as her naked breasts touched his buttons, her pale arms enfolded his neck. She
stiffened, cried out as he sank his teeth, and her face was still as the dark theater
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reverberated with shared passion” (222). Both vampires offer death; both will strip
her naked—Santiago of her blouse, Armand of her skirt—and exhibit her to the
audience. However, her responses to both radically differ. Yet, how does Armand’s
treatment of her differ from that of Santiago? What transforms her from a sadist’s
victim into a masochistic victim?
One major difference is, like a true sadist, Santiago offers only pain.
Masochism of any sort requires some sort of recompense, something to make the
pain endured pleasurable, either through its cessation or through compensation.
The woman’s entire experience with Santiago is experienced as pain, nothing
more. Armand, however, offers her cessation of fear and a painless death—both of
which would be experienced as pleasurable. Because “masochism [is] a portal to
pleasure through death” (Pugh 155), the woman’s only escape—and subsequent
source of pleasure—is her resignation to die. Additionally, “sexuality inherent in
death—notably captured in the metaphor of orgasm as the ‘petit mort’—realizes
the masochist’s ultimate desire to embrace suffering to the point when it truly can
no longer be endured” (Pugh 156). The woman’s masochistic pleasure, then,
culminates in her climactic release from life via exquisite death. Armand also
praises the woman for her great beauty, and, by doing so, suggests that she brings
something other than victimization to the sadomasochistic relationship: “‘Your
beauty is a gift to us’” (221), he says. Her forced nudity is no longer humiliation,
but a testament to her lovely appearance, yet also connotes objectification by the
male gaze. In sum, Santiago is merely a sadist with an unwilling victim; Armand
creates a sadomasochistic relationship which offers some benefits to the victim, so
it becomes more closely aligned with contractual sadomasochism—though, this
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“contractual” masochism is the forced by-product of sociocultural sadomasochism,
wherein the rich dominate the poor and men dominate women.
Specifically, this scene explicitly engages with issues of class and gender.
The woman’s garment is made of “cheap fabric” (219); she wears “a mean blouse”
(217); her skirt is “dusty” (218). It is implied that the woman is poor, possibly living
on the streets, so the theater might sweep for its victims indiscriminately. In
contrast, the audience members are rich, as “diamonds sparkled on wrists, on
throats, on fingers” (215). Consequently, this instance of sadomasochism reflects
gender and class inequity within patriarchal and privileged societies. Although the
woman ultimately submits to the vampires’ cravings, she does so because she has
no real choice, and her willingness as victim merely generates from picking the
lesser evil. An interesting subversion and affirmation of masochism, the woman
both rejects suffering with Santiago while desiring death at the hands of Armand—
that is, escape from the vampires—and finds painful vampiric penetration
pleasurable because of it. Perhaps her vacillation from refusal to submission
illustrates women’s precarious position within imprisoning patriarchal societies:
Women must struggle to overcome the gross injustices of gender inequality, or else
exploit these injustices and reap rewards—though the reward in this case
problematically espouses death.
Given the narrative device of a play within a story, it is important to discuss
the theater’s attendees. Decorated with realistic sets and accompanied by
orchestrated music, the theater is successfully viewed as performing only an
illusion. The audience perceives these elements as stagecraft, the play’s erotic
violence as merely staged. However, vampiric paleness is not face paint, characters
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fulfill their cast roles, and dialogue is not scripted. Louis repeatedly emphasizes
this fantastical effect on the audience, describing the play’s dramatic components
as “magic” (215), a “spectacle” (218), a “spell” (223). That an audience of wealthy
humans whose ignorance of the very real events occurring onstage believes this is
a play highlights the sadomasochistic “fantasy experienced for its own sake, or the
scene which is dreamed, dramatized, ritualized” (Deleuze 75). This disturbing
sadomasochistic spectacle evinces fantasized pleasure in sexual and supernatural
dominance and submission. While Massé alludes to the spectator’s capability to
live vicariously through both male sadist and female masochist, the theater’s “all-
too-human crowd” (214) more closely allies itself with Mulvey’s sadistic viewer;
they applaud when the curtain is drawn and closed, sympathize with “Gentleman
Death” (218), and sigh in arousal when the woman is stripped. Indeed, as
scopophilic spectators observing and participating in the play, they may be viewed
as sadistic, wanting the charming vampire to attain his beautiful love object.
Conversely, they may also desire the woman to accept Death as her lover so they
themselves can experience the pleasurable rapture of vampiric seduction. The
audience’s failure to recognize the theater’s reality further resonates with
sociocultural sadomasochism and with historical public displays of human sacrifice
—such as executions via the guillotine, quartering, hanging, or stoning. The
privileged and powerful are able to indulge communally in orgiastic fantasies of
power at the expense of the victimized underclasses.
Also spectators of the play, Claudia and Louis recognize the scene as
anything but artifice, as a display of undead debauchery. As the play progresses,
Louis first sympathizes with the woman, but later yearns to join the other vampires
45
and drink her blood. Overall, he reacts with ambivalence, though evincing the
scene’s Gothic horror: “I felt my spirit contract in fear for her, and in longing.”
(218). Louis desires to touch her, but is ashamed of his sadistic yearnings: “I could
feel her skin, feel the small, pointed breasts, feel my arms caressing her. I shut my
eyes against it” (221). Just as he wars with himself to resist the urge for human
blood, Louis finds himself tempted and repulsed by the theater’s malevolent
machinations:
I was sitting back in the chair, my mouth full of the taste of her, my veins in
torment…I was aware that this ache in me, this confusion, this blinding
passion which only let me go with a stubborn slowness would be obliterated
if I were to…draw him [a lone human usher] up fast in the darkness and take
him as that girl was taken. I wanted to do it, and
I wanted nothing. (223-4)
Louis sides with the victim and the torturer. For Louis, the play “creates intense
pleasurable feelings that involve both the promise of sadistic power and the
abandon linked with passive victimization. Indeed, Louis's identification with the
victimizer, Armand, impels Louis toward a homoerotic relationship with him”
(Doane and Hodges 427) that is pursued later in the novel, both activity and
passivity representing Louis’s dual sadistic masculinity and masochistic femininity.
As a female spectator, it is unclear with whom—victim or torturer—Claudia
identifies, if only because Louis only acknowledges her a few times during the play.
Claudia is mentioned three times: First, she sits “still, as if enrapt” (217) when
Death courts the woman, then she laughs when the woman pleads for her life, and,
finally, she once again sits “infinitely still, her gloved hands in her lap” (224) when
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the play ends. The second reaction is an active change compared to her first and
third gestures of passivity; perhaps these responses to the play might depict her as
identifying with the naturally powerless woman before and after her death, and
then sadistically wanting the woman to die. Or perhaps, because it is never
indicated what, exactly, Claudia laughs at, her laughter might not express
amusement but rather a morbidly humorous recognition of women’s lack of agency
and forced exhibitionism.
As a woman in a child’s body, Claudia all too well understands the grim
reality of female oppression within patriarchy, like in her relationship with Lestat.
Consequently, the blonde woman serves as a double of herself, “warn[ing] Claudia
of the dangers of growing up female…[She is] a woman suffering the imposition of
male power…In this instance, the woman is murdered, as Claudia will be later”
(Doane and Hodges 427). Additionally, “Claudia sees herself on the stage, as both
prey and an object for the entertainment of an audience…This further compounds
the feminine stereotype; not only is the victim viewed in child-like terms, not only
is she prey and an object of entertainment, but she is also unable to employ logic
and rhetoric because she has beauty” (Hoosain 96). Incessantly referred to as a
mute doll by Lestat and Louis throughout the book, Claudia is a defenseless object
of the male gaze who must ultimately suffer death at the hands of men.
The Théâtre des Vampires’ play perversely stages sexual sadomasochism for
a paying, eager audience. An infantilized, unnamed woman is subjected to an
objectifying gaze, sadistically taunted and ridiculed, and consumed directly by
vampires and indirectly by spellbound spectators. The fact that the audience
derives pleasure from particular scenes wherein erotic displays of power are
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emotionally and physically violent disturbingly speaks to patriarchal culture’s
acceptance of (vampiric) rape and normalized roles of beaten/beater,
sadist/masochist, and dominant/submissive, Rice perhaps romanticizing this fatal
gender and class inequality or, conversely, revealing the iniquity of it.
The von Sacher-Masoch Male Masochists
Another instance of the vampire/human binarism that eventually results in a
human’s death occurs with Armand’s slave boy Denis. (Notably, the slave boy,
unlike the woman on stage, is given a name.) In stark contrast to the victimization
of the woman in the theater, this pubescent male explicitly derives (sexual)
pleasure from his sanguinary submission. Indeed, Louis is surprised by the mortal
boy’s fearless desire to be dentally penetrated:
Never had I felt this, never had I experienced it, this yielding of a conscious
mortal…I saw the bluish bruise on this tender neck. He was offering it to
me. He was pressing the length of his body against me now, and I felt the
hard strength of his sex beneath his clothes pressing against my leg…and I
sank my teeth into his skin, my body rigid, that hard sex driving against me,
and I lifted him in passion off the floor…I rocked with him, devouring him,
his ecstasy, his conscious pleasure. (227-8)
Rice’s vampires do not have sex per se, yet this is perhaps the novel’s most blatant
depiction of vampiric eroticism. The boy is clearly aroused by and finds pleasurable
this painful fluid exchange.
Referring to himself as “‘slave’” of “‘[m]y master’” (248) Armand, human
Denis’s homoerotic relationship with this ancient vampire might then be viewed as
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contractual because roles are made clear. Although it is never clarified who begins
this contract, both parties benefit—as compensation for donating his blood, (in
addition to its accompanying sexual satiation) Denis receives lavish feasts of meats
and wine provided by Armand, and Armand and his followers have a reliable source
of sustenance and eventually kill him because “‘he is too young, his limbs not
strong enough, his mortal cup barely tasted’”(250) to become a vampire. Armand is
obviously the more powerful partner, the master to Denis’s slavery, deriving
sadistic pleasure in the taking of Denis’s blood and murdering him, yet Denis
apparently has his compensations.
In Anne Rice and Sexual Politics, James Keller reads their relationship as
paralleling “the Greek pederastic tradition,” noting these “relations did not take
place between members of the same social rank. The dominant male was of a
higher status than his love object. Often the object of desire was a household
slave” (24). While such a partnership does not necessarily connote sadomasochism,
it does convey pedophilic and class power dynamics of dominance and submission.
Indeed, “the pursuit of the adolescent boy by the older man was described by
stereotypes that we associate with romantic heterosexual love (conquest,
surrender…), with the passive part going to the boy” (Sedgwick 698). However,
Greek pederasty “had a strongly educational function…this was a bond of
mentorship; the boys were apprentices” who inherited “privileges includ[ing] the
power to command the labor of slaves of both sexes, and of women of any class
including their own” (Sedgwick 698). In this sense, the homoerotic pairing of
Armand and Denis resembles an ancient patriarchal sociocultural system of
49
initiation and award, wherein Denis reaps benefits from his submission, though he
never attains the “apprenticeship” status of vampire.
Two other minor human masochists are depicted in the characters of Louis’s
interviewer
Daniel and the unnamed musician paramour of Lestat. In contrast to the unnamed
woman and Denis, these characters expand Rice’s sadomasochistic spectrum,
representing a greater parity in terms of vampire/human power. While in New
Orleans, Lestat forms a relationship with an anonymous young musician. Lestat’s
“long erotic courtship that results in the boy’s conversion” (Keller 24) can be seen
as a reminiscent repetition of his homosocial and homoerotic relationship with
friend and fledgling violinist Nicholas (introduced in The Vampire Lestat). While
Lestat is more sadistic in his relationship with Louis and Claudia, the musician
boy’s status as a human lover who becomes Lestat’s fledgling indicates power is
not an issue in their relationship. Additionally, the other minor masochist is the
interviewer boy Daniel. After listening to Louis’s irreverent revenant life, Daniel
masochistically yearns to be transformed into a vampire; more than sexual
satisfaction, Daniel desires the sadistic power derived from vampirism. Although
Louis refuses to change him, Daniel eventually attains his desires by becoming the
lover and fledgling of Armand in The Queen of the Damned. While Denis and the
woman are killed, the musician and Daniel are vampirized, demonstrating a more
equal relationship founded on love rather than satiation, one that might allow the
(human) masochist to transform into (vampiric) sadist. Ultimately, however, such a
discrepancy given these male and female masochists might further represent
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women’s oppression, whereas males reap rewards of sexual gratification and
powerful privilege—and women receive nothing but death.
A Hard Man is Good to Find: Homoeroticism
But I can’t tell you exactly, any more than I could tell
you exactly what is the experience of sex if you have
never had it.
Anne Rice
Interview with the Vampire
As Eve Sedgwick writes, “in any male-dominated society, there is a special
relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the
structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power” (711).
Relationships between Lestat and Louis and between Armand and Louis are the
primary homosocial bonds in the novel, and both pairings exhibit sadomasochistic
behaviors. Although Rice privileges and insists upon male homosocial and
homosexual relationships throughout Interview with the Vampire, her characters
also perform essentialist gender roles that replicate male-female sadomasochistic
binaries, doubly reinforcing a patriarchal narrative.
Lestat/Louis: The Arranged Marriage
The interviewee of Interview with the Vampire, Louis Pointe du Lac narrates
his vampiric vicissitudes—from a brief recollection of his human life to his
existentialist angst since his forced transformation. Twenty-five years old and a
wealthy plantation owner in the antebellum American South, human Louis enjoys
the authority of a privileged white patriarch, responsible for his family and the
cultivation of his land in New Orleans. The inheritor of an estate, Louis as eldest
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male child is thus powerful as afforded by patrilineage, his bourgeois lifestyle
“both luxurious and primitive…attractive…better there than we could have ever
lived in France” (Rice 6). Louis and his family immigrate to America to escape
Revolutionary France, and are subsequently endowed with opportunity, land,
slaves, and money, all of which actually fail to dehumanize him. Though he
possesses pecuniary power and socioeconomic status, Louis does not tyrannically
exert this power; rather, it directly makes him victim of the vampire Lestat de
Lioncourt.
Inconsolable over the sudden and mysterious loss of his younger brother
after settling in New Orleans, Louis blames himself and broods, engaging in
suicidal thoughts and behaviors: “‘I know I didn’t kill him…It’s that I cannot live
now that he’s dead’” (12); here demonstrating his self-sacrificial masochism
through emotional suffering from the novel’s beginning, Louis as both human and
vampire seeks out scenarios in which he is victim to emotional pain and suffering.
Louis’s repetitive melancholy is akin to Massé’s classification of the “Heroine’s
suffering” as “the principal action of the story because it is the only action she can
perform” (19).
Indeed, feminine Louis is emotionally dependent on his companions and wishes to
die when he loses them.
Wandering drunk and alone one night, he is attacked by the vampire Lestat,
who drains him to the point of death and then vampirizes him in an intimate
homoerotic encounter. A lecherous parasite after another man’s property, Lestat
victimizes Louis precisely because he possesses money and power; therefore, Louis
is positioned as a highly relevant victim in terms of socioeconomic status: “As I told
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you, this vampire Lestat wanted the plantation…he was not a very discriminating
person…Living in New Orleans had become too difficult for him, considering his
needs and the necessity to care for his father, and he wanted Pointe du Lac” (Rice
15-6). While wealth would normally translate to social power and privilege, it is
perhaps more apt to view it, in Louis’s situation, as making him a desirable mate.
In other words, the wealthy Louis is cast in the role of rich heiress, with the
penniless Lestat as the handsome, charismatic, fortune-hunting male suitor. Like a
romantic heroine, Louis resists, then capitulates to Lestat’s erotic advances: “I
wanted to struggle, but [Lestat] pressed so hard with his fingers that he held my
entire prone body in check; and as soon as I stopped my abortive attempt at
rebellion, he sank his teeth into my neck…I remember that the movement of his
lips raised the hair all over my body, sent a shock of sensation through my body
that was not unlike the pleasure of passion” (19). Once “married,” Louis feels
exploited, losing control over his financial resources in the same way eighteenth-
century brides were forced to cede control over any property to their husbands;
Louis’s possessions might further be viewed as his dowry: Indeed, their lives
together do initially resemble the arranged, aristocratic marriages of the
eighteenth century, one in which the bond has been created to consolidate family
wealth. The young, discontented, neglected wife remains at home while the
dissolute husband goes out marauding every night, squandering the collective
fortune. Later in the novel, Louis indicates that Lestat only remains with him
because the elder vampire
is utterly incompetent in financial matters and requires Louis to handle the
money.
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(Keller 15-6)
Shakira Hoosain’s dissertation “In the Shadow of the Night: The Gendered Subtext
of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles” also analyzes Lestat’s usurpation of Louis’s
economic power as his feminization, noting “Louis becomes a far more feminine
character with the loss of his economic power” (46), assuming a passive and
subservient role in relation to Lestat. Although Louis and
Lestat are initially lovers, sharing a coffin (or “marriage bed”), their relationship is
hierarchical. Lestat chooses Louis as his victim/mate, and their relationship is
founded upon and conjugally contracted by socioeconomic power, with Lestat in
control as powerful vampire and
“husband.”
Gaining power from his conquest of Louis’s cash, now privileged and
profligate Lestat is characterized at various times as a “bully” (22), “vicious” (36),
“mocking” (37), a “killer” (45), “cold” (45) and “detached” (44), while Louis is
conversely depicted as loving, “coward[ly]” (16), suicidal, and “squeamish” (16);
engendering essentialist qualities, “Lestat possesses traditional male attributes,
such as aggression, bluntness, insensitivity, and practicality. Louis is feminized,
manifesting traits such as passivity, sensitivity, compunction, compassion, and
resentment” (Keller 16). Given our model of gendered sadomasochism, Lestat
exhibits traits of the sadistic male while Louis resembles the masochistic female.
Disregarding Louis’s more delicate sensibilities and stronger sense of morality by
denigrating his dietary qualms, Lestat’s “coldness…is present…in the apathy of the
sadist” (Deleuze 117). Lestat’s killing is further represented as sadistic: “Lestat
was masterfully clever and utterly vicious” (Rice 77). Plagued with a human
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conscience though now a vampire, Louis refuses to kill humans for sustenance (to
bite or not to bite, that is the question); he instead subsists on rats’ blood to the
dismay of Lestat. Sensitive to others, Louis is more compassionate than Lestat, his
weakness connoted as inferior and a feminine trait; conversely, the strong and
masculine Lestat humiliates Louis, performing the role of sadist.
Although Lestat uses him for his own benefit, Louis initially finds him
“extraordinary…a biblical angel…spellbound by the sheer beauty of his
appearance” (17). Yet this also highlights Louis’s cognitive dissonance, his
vacillation between masculinity/femininity and vampirism/humanity. However,
Lestat delineates their roles from the onset, him as dominant and active male while
Louis is submissive and passive (fe)male. Though their sexual/sleeping position in
the coffin/“marriage bed” depicts Louis on top, metaphorically connotative of
superiority and power, Lestat is actually the more powerful as sadistic partner who
controls the relationship: “‘I’m getting into the coffin…and you will get on top of
me if you know what’s good for you.’ And I did. I lay face-down on him, utterly
confused by my absence of dread and filled with a distaste for being so close to
him, handsome and intriguing though he was” (25).
In addition, Lestat is constantly portrayed as more powerful in terms of his
epistemophilia or supposed knowledge of vampires. As Massé notes, “the urges to
look and to know—what he [Freud] terms the scopophilic and epistemophilic
instincts—are closely related to one another and to sadism. To look, then, can be to
know, to be privy to the forbidden knowledge that means power” (41). As an older
vampire, Lestat possesses pertinent knowledge preventing Louis “from being his
equal yet” (Rice 25), which generates Louis’s intense repugnance of Lestat despite
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his initial love for and attraction toward him; “I did not like Lestat at all” (25), he
states after his first time sleeping with him. Although Lestat clearly embodies the
sadistic knower, Louis does not completely assume the role of oblivious masochist;
he instead desires Lestat’s knowledge so he can escape their relationship. While
Louis resists categorization as the “masochistic, exhibitionist woman who is
supposed to be blind to the forbidden knowledge that shapes her life” (Massé 42)
due to his epistemophilic curiosity, Louis dependently cleaves to Lestat, enduring
their contracted abuse to obtain knowledge. Upholding this relation of sadism to
knowledge, Lestat mocks Louis for his lack thereof:
And all the time, he belittled me and attacked me for my love of the senses,
my reluctance to kill, and the near swoon which killing could produce in me.
He laughed uproariously when I discovered that I could see myself in a
mirror and that crosses had no effect upon me, and would taunt me with
sealed lips when I asked about God or the devil. (Rice 37)
Ever wont to “swoon” when encountering death, Louis is thus depicted as feminine
in his ignorance, equating sensibility/sensitivity and naïveté with essentialist
gender roles.
Replicating and repeating his traumatic suffering for his brother’s death and
his cognitive dissonance to kill humans, Louis’s desired reward for his endurance
of Lestat’s sadistic humiliation and emotional abuse is existential knowledge of his
vampiric condition. Further, he even “manifests battered-wife syndrome. Despite
domestic abuse, he still harbors deep affection for, and commitment to, Lestat”
(Keller 18), willing to remain with his inhumane/inhuman partner until Lestat
capitulates to Louis’s epistemophilic yearnings. Even after Lestat teaches him the
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basics of vampiric survival and Louis realizes “I was his complete superior and I
had been sadly cheated in having him for a teacher…I felt cold towards him…I saw
that if I were to maximize every experience available to me, I must exert my own
powers over my learning. Lestat was of no use” (Rice 31), Louis still professes that
“he had me at a great disadvantage. He hinted there was much I didn’t know and
must know and that he alone could tell me” (35). Ultimately, Louis is “hopelessly
locked to him and jarred over and over by his viciousness” (36), relegated to an
essentialist feminine position of obedience, ignorance, and inferiority. Lestat is
constructed as powerful because of his knowledge—“‘You use knowledge for
personal power’” (80)—and Louis can only break away once he realizes Lestat
knows little more than himself.
Once Louis becomes unhappy with their partnership and determines Lestat
lacks sufficient knowledge, he questions whether he should leave Lestat and suffer
the pangs of loneliness—or kill himself: “I have to leave him or die, I thought. It
would be sweet to die, I thought. Yes, die. I wanted to die before. Now I wish to
die” (70). In choosing death, Louis assumes the role of masochist; he will find
pleasure through death (as he repeatedly desires). Yet he is unable to escape
Lestat’s power when “Lestat resorts to even more cunning means of maintaining
his partner’s fidelity…A cliché and potentially destructive means of saving a
doomed marriage is to strengthen the bond with a child, a mutual creation and a
reason to remain together” (Keller 16-7). Resonating with the cultural practice of
reviving a couple’s failing relationship through procreation, Lestat’s co-siring the
child vampire Claudia is an unsuccessful ploy to maintain his hold over Louis.
However, this act only makes Louis despise Lestat even more, as Claudia then
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becomes Louis’s companion and lover. Their relationship is triangulated, and the
sadistic father Lestat is eventually “killed” by Claudia twice, only to return to seek
revenge or eventually waste away in New Orleans.
Initially exploiting Louis for his money and status, Lestat’s natural role as
sadist is exhibited in his relationship with Louis. Lestat kills without regard to
human life, often feeding in front of Louis to torture him. Because ethical and
religious Louis resents his vampirization and desires information, Lestat takes
advantage of their relationship in order to abuse Louis emotionally, sadistically
exerting power by performing actions antithetical to Louis’s moral beliefs. From
the beginning of the novel, Louis is depicted as melancholic and contemplative, in
flux between binaries of masculinity/femininity, vampire/human, and
religious/atheist. Although Louis eventually finds a less domineering companion in
Armand, his relationship with Lestat is structured by Lestat’s sadistic pleasure in
emotional torture and Louis’s own repetition-compulsion (and even enjoyment) of
suffering and suicidal angst. In addition, despite their biological maleness, they
perform conventional masculinity and femininity, troublingly enacting the male-
female sadomasochistic dyad, reinscribing traditional notions of gender inequality,
and reproducing patriarchal gender imbalance. Perhaps because Lestat and Louis
are both male and thus equal in strength, their sadomasochism is psychological
and emotional rather than physical.
Armand/Louis: The Love Match
In contrast to Louis’s first encounter with Lestat, wherein human Louis is
unwittingly attacked, physically vampirized, and emotionally victimized by Lestat,
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Louis is instead initially allured by the mysterious and seductive “auburn-haired”
(229) vampire at the theater. Armand is adolescent yet ancient, and his century-old
composure and expansive understanding of vampiric existence depict him as
emotionally detached. While such aloofness is neither cold nor cruel—not of the
typical Deleuzian sadist—Armand’s introductory demeanor foreshadows his
sadistic characterization later. Louis’s and Armand’s relationship is not nearly as
unequal as that of Lestat and Louis, yet there still exist dynamics of dominance and
submission, Louis again repeating his role as masochist.
Like Lestat, Armand exhibits more masculine attributes while Louis
identifies as more feminine. As explicated above, Louis can be read as an
effeminate male—perhaps even as female—in relation to Lestat, and, similarly,
reprises this role once he meets Armand: “And it was as if the great feminine
longing of my mind were being awakened again to be satisfied” (234). Louis once
again embodies a paradox which affirms patriarchal power structures: Identifying
as more feminine in relation to his two male lovers, Louis replicates the
male/female sadomasochistic binary of masculine strength and feminine weakness.
Yet, as a biological male, his homosocial and homoerotic relationships with Armand
and Lestat are privileged within the text, while female homosocial relations are
both relegated to the periphery and obliterated.
Armand’s superior knowledge—he is the eldest, wisest living vampire and
the leader of the Parisian vampires—also characterizes him as the male
epistemophilic in contrast to Louis’s naïveté. Louis observes his daughter/lover
Claudia and his love interest Armand engaged in silent conversation, highlighting
Louis’s epistemophilic ineptitude: “And they were gazing at each other with a
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preternatural understanding from which I was simply excluded” (235). Though
Louis misconstrues this scene as a telepathic conversation between the two, it is
later revealed as Armand’s powerfully hypnotic captivity and silencing of Claudia.
Louis and others are vulnerable to Armand’s epistemophilic mind reading, and he
uses this ability to sadistically sway and exert power over his victims: “It seemed to
me then that Armand, with his hypnotic power, aimed in some way for the
maximum truth in presentation of himself: he had drawn out of me without words
my state of mind” (239). However, Louis erroneously believes Armand as selfless
and good, his epistemophilic power as benevolent.
Claudia warns Louis against pursuing Armand as his love object, professing
such a relationship as detrimental to their own:
“He rendered me powerless!...He draws life out of me into himself…Life out
of the boy who is his slave, life out of me whom he would make his slave. He
loves you. He loves you. He would have you, and he would not have me
stand in the way.”
“You don’t understand him!” I fought it, kissing her…
“No, I understand him only too well...it is you who don’t understand him.
Love’s blinded you, your fascination with his knowledge, his power. If you
knew how he drinks death you’d hate him more than you ever hated Lestat.
Louis, you must never return to him. I tell you, I’m in danger!” (247-8)
Claudia’s warning clearly articulates the unequal power dynamics between Armand
and Louis (while simultaneously depicting females as impediments to male
homosocial relations): Armand as epistemophilic leader of the theater coven is
positioned as powerful, and Louis might desire his knowledge but more
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importantly wants him as his male lover in order to acquire another (male)
companion and perhaps power through association. Idealizing his love object and
unable to discern Armand’s intentions, Louis dismisses Claudia’s claims. Armand
literally sucks the life out of the woman on stage, feeds on and kills slave boy
Denis, and saps Claudia of her power (and kills her later); Armand obviously
assumes a sadistic role in these contexts, deriving pleasure from his vampiric
victimizing. Even when Louis acknowledges the possibility of Armand’s wicked
ways—“a vampire who was perhaps more evil than Lestat, for whom I became as
evil as Lestat, but in whom I saw other only promise of good in evil of which I could
conceive” (273)—Louis still yearns to consummate his desire for him and is willing
to delay this pleasure until he has rid himself of Claudia. In his relationship with
Armand, Louis is thus configured as Deleuze’s deferring masochist, his reward
epistemophilic power, supposed equality, and love—all in a homoerotic and
homosocial bond.
Although they share a mutual, passionate love, their relationship is tainted
by these gendered sadomasochistic dynamics. Indeed, Hoosain analyzes Louis as
continuing a passive, subservient role with Armand: “Louis becomes enraptured by
Armand and, just as with Lestat, Louis takes on the mantel of Femininity in relation
to Armand” (98). When Armand as sadistic scopophilic relentlessly “watch[es]
[Louis] again like a painting” (Rice 234), Louis briefly admires Armand’s beauty yet
ceases gazing. Akin to a demure woman ashamed of her sexuality, Louis “dropped
[his] eyes” when desire is reciprocated, when Louis “felt them [Armand’s eyes] pull
me towards him” (249). Again referring to Armand’s scopophilia and
epistemophilia, Louis states: “I was weak, too weak for his wonder, and again I
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looked away from him” (249). Acting as Mulvey’s masochistic exhibitionist, Louis
acknowledges his powerlessness and diverts his gaze—and, in extension, his
masculinity—to become voiceless object of Armand’s scopophilia.
Armand recognizes Louis’s easy conquest, all the while employing
commanding diction: “‘Listen to me…You would yield to me now were I to question
you. Look into my eyes’” (251). Rhetoric of dominance and submission continues
throughout their interactions, as Armand uses his hypnotic power to coerce Louis
to vampirize Madeleine, Claudia’s companion/mother. Their dialogue further
depicts Armand as diabolically dominating and Louis as forgiving, passive puppet
of Armand:
“That I did it to be free of Claudia, to be free to come to you . . . yes, I realize
that. But the ultimate responsibility lies with me!” I said.
“No. I mean, directly. I made you do it!…I exerted my strongest power to
persuade you to do it. Didn’t you know this?”
“No!” I bowed my head…For the moment, I couldn’t answer. I only
nodded…“You must never force me to do something against my will! You
must never exert such power…And you are satisfied…I don’t mean to be
harsh. You have me. I love you.” (285-6)
Although Louis acts as though he demands equality and independence, and
Armand feigns powerlessness—“My power stops somewhere inside you…There I
am powerless” (286)—their relationship is founded upon dominance and
submission, Louis finally physically succumbing to his desire for Armand once
Claudia is removed from their triangle: “I felt my body turning to face him,
drawing nearer to him, as though I were being moved not by myself but by him”
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(287). Indeed, Louis is wholly dependent upon Armand for his well-being, much as
selfsacrificial and exhibitionist masochists are: “‘He alone can give me the strength
to be what I am.
I can’t continue to live divided and consumed with misery. Either I go with him, or I
die’” (289), Louis tells Claudia. (This suicidal epithet is voiced in each of his
relationships, demonstrating his recurring compulsion to suffer.) Even when
Claudia is killed under Armand’s direction, Louis returns to Armand’s company,
using language connotative of erotic submission: “And then finally I surrendered. I
turned to Armand again and let my eyes penetrate his eyes, and let him draw close
to me as if he meant to make me his victim, and I bowed my head and felt his firm
arm around my shoulder” (313).
While the stifling and humiliating love of Lestat imprisoned Louis, the great
romance of Louis and Armand is also complexly hierarchical. Lestat avers vampires
cannot coexist, and partners are never equal: “‘They’re jealous of their secret and
their territory; and if you find one or more of them together it will be for safety
only, and one will be the slave of the other, the way you [Louis] are of me’” (83).
One is always superior and the other inferior, as in sadomasochistic relationships.
There is greater parity in Armand’s and Louis’s relationship, yet there is still a
power imbalance:
For vampires, physical love culminates and is satisfied in one thing, the kill. I
speak of another kind of love which drew me to [Armand] completely as the
teacher which Lestat had never been. Knowledge would never be withheld
by Armand, I knew it. It would pass through him as through a pane of glass
so that I might bask in it and absorb it and grow. (252)
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Yet, like many masochists, Louis is capable of turning into a sadist. After Armand
kills Claudia,
Louis burns down the Théâtre des Vampires, torching members of the troupe and
decapitating Santiago. And, while succumbing to Armand’s affections, Louis
nonetheless keeps a part of himself emotionally distant from him. Ultimately,
however, homosocial relations— sadomasochistic or not—provide the most
powerful relations within the novel, as Louis “chooses not between [Claudia] and
Armand, but between Lestat and Armand” (Jowett 7), and, even if the
sadomasochism enacted within these homosocial dyads is gendered—masculinity
as sadistic and femininity as masochistic—it nonetheless allows Louis as (fe)male
masochist more agency than any woman—masochistic or not—is permitted within
the world of Rice’s novel.
Growing Pains: Lestat/Louis/Claudia
Can you picture it, this splendid domesticity,
dim lamps, the vampire father singing to the
vampire daughter?
Anne Rice
Interview with the Vampire
While Louis exhibits traditional gender traits that problematically equate
femininity with weakness, perhaps Rice’s most disturbing representation of
femininity and females is engendered in the character of Claudia, whose
physiological growth is stunted at age five when Lestat and Louis vampirize her.
The introduction of Claudia to Lestat’s and Louis’s relationship triangulates desire,
fragmenting the bonds between the two male lovers. Their vampiric family
becomes an immortal perversion of the nuclear family, as the Oedipal/Electra
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complex and the beating fantasy are complexly realized in the trio’s incestuous
dynamics. While Lestat co-creates Claudia to cement his failing relationship with
Louis, she is ultimately destroyed—punished for her monstrous femininity—to
secure the relationship between Louis and Armand. Exacerbated by Claudia’s
inescapable role as woman-child, this relational inversion depicts the disposal of
females as property to privilege the novel’s—and, by extension, patriarchal
society’s—male homoerotic and homosocial bonds.
Lestat/Louis/Claudia: The Nuclear Family
Wandering the streets of New Orleans one night while battling the urge to
feed on humans, Louis hears a child’s cry. Although he had abstained for four years
from drinking human blood, Louis succumbs to his thirst in seeking the child. The
girl is a poor starving orphan not older than five years, found crying over her
mother’s death in a room where her mother’s corpse lies. While Louis does not kill
the girl but instead “threw the child down,” causing her to “lay like a jointless doll”
(74)—from her introduction characterizing her as a doll—the enterprising Lestat
sadistically capitalizes on this incident to revive his failing relationship with Louis,
notably referring to the girl Claudia as an object to be exploited: “‘Shall I go back
and make her a vampire? We could use her, Louis, and think of all the pretty
dresses we could buy for her’” (74). Louis finds Lestat’s opportunism disgusting,
hating Lestat and desiring to kill him. The next day, however, they return to the
little girl, Lestat inverting his masculine sadistic role and expressing maternal
sentiments: “‘I want a child tonight. I am like a mother . . . I want a child!’” (88).
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This inversion is only temporary, though, as he comes to assume the role of father
in their family.
While Louis “suck[s] her dry” (90), Lestat vampirizes her; in this sense, they
co-sire her in an erotic procreative union. Neither Claudia nor Louis have a choice
in her vampirization, Louis coerced to drink her blood—“I obeyed him” (90)—and
Lestat transforming her in her sleep, and they both must suffer as a result of
Lestat’s sadistic impulses. Although Claudia asserts “‘I’m not your daughter…I’m
my mamma’s daughter’” (93), Lestat wields authority by claiming her as “‘our
daughter, Louis’s daughter and my daughter, do you see?’” (93-4). By siring
Claudia despite Louis’s protestations, Lestat “reserves the power of creation for
himself as the patriarch,” also “dancing with the corpse of her mother before
removing the child from her home (thus the power of the mother, the female is
destroyed)” (Jowett 5). Lestat ends the evening by giving Claudia the option of
bunkmate, but ultimately choosing for her: “‘Now, whom should you sleep with?
Louis or me?...Perhaps you should sleep with Louis. After all, when I’m tired . . .
I’m not so kind’” (Rice 94). Both Lestat’s actions and words foreshadow his familial
role and Claudia’s choice of parent, Lestat depicted as an oppressive father and
Louis as a nurturing mother.
Although Lestat initially expresses a maternal instinct to produce a child, he
ultimately assumes the role of father figure to Claudia, providing her with the basic
knowledge to survive, while Louis shares his love for art and compassion for
humanity; teaching Claudia to kill, Lestat’s role of hunter is clearly more
aggressive than Louis’s aesthete admiration, as Louis notes, “Claudia and Lestat
might hunt and seduce, stay long in the company of the doomed victim…But I still
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could not bear it” (97), and “I was educating Claudia, whispering…that our eternal
life was useless to us if we did not see the beauty all around us” (99). While Lestat
teaches Claudia survival skills, Louis instills in her an appreciation for culture and
people. Although he views her as a doll and a scopophilic object, explicated below,
he also teaches her to look, to desire knowledge from Lestat, as expressed in the
phrase “vampire eyes”: “‘You taught me the words vampire eyes…You taught me to
drink the world, to hunger for more,’” (112) Claudia says. In terms of gendered
sadomasochism, Lestat’s humiliation of and epistemophilic sadism exerted over
Louis can be translated into his role as father and as family patriarch, while Louis’s
more feminine masochistic role is exhibited in his motherly affection for Claudia.
Louis recognizes Lestat’s capability to sadistically manipulate or influence Claudia,
so desires to guard her from the authoritarian father figure: “I thought only of
protecting her from Lestat. I gathered her into my coffin every morning and would
not let her out of my sight with him if possible…She was a child. She needed care”
(96). Lestat planned to paint a picture of happy domesticity through offspring, but
Louis’s and Lestat’s relationship is conversely fragmented because the former is
wary of the latter, loves Claudia, and she is partial to him as mother.
Clearly proving ineffective, Lestat’s initial desire for a doll-like domicile goes
awry when Claudia matures and begins to voice her discontent. Although Claudia
is positioned as helpless and naïve object of the male gaze, she begins to portray
more sadistic tendencies, perhaps inherited from Lestat, over the years. Keller
reads her as a “sadistic monster,” a masculinized byproduct of her even more
sadistic father: “Many years after she would have been an adult, she still displays
childlike personality features: intemperate anger, vindictiveness, pouting,
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tantrums, and sadism” (19). Learning how to hunt from Lestat, Claudia becomes a
“fierce killer” when feeding alone, “now capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood
with all a child’s demanding” (Rice 96); akin to Lestat, and which Louis finds
monstrous, she manipulates and uses her victims: “They found death fast in those
first years, before she learned to play with them, to lead them to the doll shop or
the café where they gave her steaming cups of chocolate…waiting, as if feasting
silently on their terrible kindness” (99). Additionally, she becomes curious about
her origins as she matures psychologically, attempting to exhibit sadistic
epistemophilic agency when she wishes to be regarded as more than just a doll:
“‘Which of you did it? Which of you made me what I am?’” (107). Increasingly cold
to Lestat and “staring at him for hours” (104), Claudia’s sadism is directed toward
her surrogate father. She realizes Lestat sired her and demands to know how to
vampirize others, questioning his authority and wishing to possess his power:
“How did you do it?”
“And why should I tell you? It’s my power.”
“Why yours alone?” she asked, her voice ice, her eyes heartless…She glared
up at him fearlessly…with total detachment. (108)
Because Claudia is otherwise helpless due to her imprisonment in a static child’s
body, she “seeks affirmation of her existence…through implicit accusation of her
victimizer…[and] through reenactment of sadism” (Massé 51). She cannot sire a
vampire because she does not know how to and is not equipped with the required
strength—she is impotent—so she intends to take revenge with the limited
information she does possess. Thus depicted as the cold and cruel sadist as she
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matures, Claudia appropriates the sadistic skills acquired from her father to
retaliate against this same oppressor.
Both Freud’s beating fantasy and Rice’s vampire family show “the father as
their center” (Massé 65). However, Claudia as beaten (because of her forced
vampirism and perpetual infantilization) despises her beater/father and instead
loves her mother Louis. The family’s triangulated dynamics might represent an
inverted rendition of the second stage of the beating drama, in which “My father is
beating me.” Although this stage indicates “masochistic feminine desire in which
being beaten and being loved become one and the same” (Massé 67), the beaten
child Claudia does not equate pain received from the father with pleasure, but
instead allies with the mother and her victimization. Able to recognize Lestat’s
sadistic domination and Louis’s subservience, Claudia identifies with Louis as
Lestat’s powerless prey: “‘And we’ve been his puppets, you and I; you remaining to
take care of him, and I your saving companion. Now’s time to end it, Louis. Now’s
time to leave him’” (117). Rice’s sadomasochistic model offers an interesting
deviation from formulaic Freudian beater-beaten theory, and perhaps deserves
further study of the implications of a father-daughter sadomasochistic rivalry.
Making plans to leave Lestat, Claudia actively conspires while Louis
passively follows; as Claudia states, “‘And I shall free us both…I will kill him’”
(121). Claudia’s desire to kill Lestat stems from her own infantilized helplessness,
for which Lestat mocks her, and murder is her exerted agency. Unable to glean
information about other vampires’ existence from Lestat, she wishes to possess the
power Lestat has to make another of her kind: “‘I want him dead and will have him
dead. I shall enjoy it…Do you think I’ll possess his power and my own power when I
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take him?’” (123). Here, Claudia orchestrates revenge as a lone assassin, Louis
complicit and again a slave to another’s demands, perhaps even a love-sick
masochist to Claudia’s commanding sadism: “‘Don’t interfere with me or seek to
know the time I choose to do it, nor try to come between us. . . .’ She raised her
hand now to hush me and caught mine in an iron grasp, her tiny fingers biting into
my tight, tortured flesh” (123). If Claudia assumes the role of sadist and Louis of
masochist—and these roles are more fluid and equal than the roles played by him
and Lestat—then Claudia is the one in control, their contract structured around
their mutual desire to leave Lestat, to be free of his sadistic spouse and her sadistic
father.
While the beating fantasy more closely explores the daughter’s role in a
sadomasochistic dynamic, Keller reads Claudia’s role in the family as a confusing
conflation of the Oedipal and Electra complexes. Claudia is cast as Electra in her
“absence of the penis, a condition for which she blames her mother, who is also
bereft of the male organ. As she develops, however, she comes to sympathize and
identify with her mother and to long for her father, who possesses the penis that
she desires for herself” (18). Thus, the Electra complex is confused because
“Claudia resents the father in the same way that the oedipal daughter resents the
mother. She blames Lestat for the condition that she regards as inadequate” (18).
While Freudian penis envy might characterize this triangle, I interpret Claudia as
desiring the metaphorical penis established by epistemophilic theory: She desires
power derived from knowledge, which is possessed by her father. She might not
desire a penis per se, but her sadistic epistemophilia and rivalry with the father
more aptly characterize her as the “oedipal male child. She develops a longing for
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the mother and a resentment for the father whom she fears and eventually tries to
kill” (19). Keller reads Claudia’s “inability to mature” as the Lacanian phallic lack,
and this “might signify her castration by a father who is unwilling to relinquish
control over the mother” (19). Although my reading differs in the sense of Claudia’s
and Louis’s penis envy as their masculine epistemophilia, both complexes are still
conflated, perhaps instead suggesting “the oedipal moment uncover[ing] not the
girl’s desire for the father so much as the father’s desire for the girl child, the
infantilized woman who is a perfectly obedient and dependent object of desire”
(Doane and Hodges 424). Claudia as a permanent doll, both as child and woman, is
indeed transformed into a vampire to be used.
Claudia’s sadistic cunning culminates in her attempts to kill Lestat twice,
both of which are unsuccessful. Because Claudia is never exactly instructed how to
kill vampires, Claudia uses her knowledge of survival to end Lestat’s life.
Erroneously believed effective, her first attempt employs the limited knowledge
Lestat gives her, information pertaining to hunting and longevity—do not drink
blood from a corpse. Drugging two orphan boys with absinthe and laudanum
before killing them, Claudia gifts her dead but warm victims to Lestat. Enervated
from the boys’ bad blood, Lestat is unable to return to his coffin to recuperate,
seeking Louis’s assistance. Instead, Claudia aggressively voices her opinion of
Lestat’s role as patriarch: “‘I’ll put you in your coffin, Father…I’ll put you in it
forever’” (134). She then sadistically slashes his throat with a kitchen knife, and
“his entire body was shriveling, drying up” (135), emaciated from blood loss. As
Janice Doane and Devon Hodges note in their article entitled “Undoing
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Feminism: From the Preoedipal to Postfeminism in Anne Rice's Vampire
Chronicles,” such an “erotic scene of violence depicts male homoerotic desire as…
an obstacle to women's desire for power” and, privileging males over females,
“[m]en's taste for boys leaves them too preoccupied to keep track of the
machinations of women, with whom they are not comfortable or familiar anyway”
(425). A man who exploits a female to consolidate a homosocial relationship with
another man, Lestat always already epitomizes the male chauvinist in this scene,
further enacting his misogyny later when he returns to deliver skewed revenge
against his transgressive daughter.
Claudia and Louis then dispose of his pruned corpse in a lake. Seemingly
free of the father, they continue their lives together, making plans to venture to
Europe in their epistemophilic search for other vampires. However, their peace is
disrupted when Lestat and his musician lover suddenly invade their home in New
Orleans. Somehow resurrected from his watery grave, Lestat’s “skin was a mass of
scars, a hideous covering of injured flesh, as though every wrinkle of his ‘death’
had left its mark upon him” (Rice 155). Claudia and Louis burn the house down and
flee the scene, hoping Lestat and his fledgling die.
Although Claudia attempts to usurp Lestat’s power, she is ultimately
unsuccessful.
After Louis and Claudia attend the perverted play at the Théâtre des Vampires,
Lestat reappears to take vengeance on his twice-attempted murder. One of the only
laws created and enforced by Armand and the theater criminalizes ending the life
of another vampire: “‘It is the crime that means death to any vampire anywhere
who commits it. It is to kill your own kind!’” (245). Claudia does not actually kill
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Lestat, yet she must suffer punishment. Lestat specifically desires his daughter’s
death, notably excluding Louis despite his participation: “‘She did it to me, Louis.
She did it to me. You didn’t! She has to die’” (294). Just as Claudia was sired and
exploited to save Lestat’s relationship with Louis, so is she also discarded both
when Lestat wishes to reclaim Louis for himself and when Armand and Louis
desire each other. Thus, “the homoerotic relation between men supports
homosocial bonds that make women into objects of exchange” (Doane and Hodges
425), as Lestat “ushered Claudia into vampirism for revenge” (Rice 95) on Louis
for his desire to leave Lestat, and Claudia is killed for the same reason.
“I don’t know what it is. She’s a woman”: Woman-Child and the Monstrous-Feminine
Through her desire to rebel against the father, Claudia is characterized as
the monstrous-feminine, what Barbara Creed defines as “what it is about a woman
that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject” (1). Rebellious Claudia is oppressed as
a woman-child during her life and horrifically murdered for her transgressions
against the father.
In addition to the father-mother-daughter triad, Rice’s vampires are
eroticized, blurring boundaries between fledgling and lover. Just as Lestat and
Louis were lovers, “[i]ncest and pedophilia are overt in the Louis-Lestat-Claudia
triangle” (Wasson 204). Vampirized in her sleep and thus without agency, Claudia is
metaphorically raped, from the beginning representing her heinous pedophilic and
misogynist victimization by lustful men. She utters her first words after her
transformation, and her voice is deemed by Louis as “equal to her physical
beauty…It was sensual. She was sensual” (Rice 92). Although Louis has been
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identified as the mother in their sadomasochistic family, it is important to note his
dual role as heterosexual male lover. As aforementioned, Lestat orders Claudia to
bunk with Louis; while this might first allude to a child’s choice of parent to sleep
alongside, it also represents Louis’s and Claudia’s added heteroerotic relationship.
Claudia at five years old has “a woman’s eyes” and is “the most beautiful child”
(93) Louis has ever seen, as Louis employs the male gaze to objectify Claudia. She
is only a child here—both physically and psychologically—yet Louis as heterosexual
male already sees her as both sexualized doll and infantilized seductress, motifs
developed throughout Interview with the Vampire—and, by extension, realized in
women’s paradoxical roles in patriarchy.
In the first years of their relationship together, Claudia is spoiled by both
adoptive parents, given luxurious clothes and toys, “so that she was always a
vision, not just of child beauty, with her curling lashes and glorious yellow hair, but
of the taste of finely trimmed bonnets and tiny lace gloves, flaring velvet coats and
capes, and sheer white puffed-sleeve gowns with gleaming blue sashes” (98). More
than simply gifted these items, Claudia is dressed up as a plaything, adorned as a
doll for both Lestat’s and Louis’s entertainment: “Lestat played with her as if she
were a magnificent doll, and I played with her as if she were a magnificent doll”
(98). Louis perceives her as silent and attractive, perhaps attractive because of her
silence: “Mute and beautiful, she played with dolls, dressing, undressing them by
the hour. Mute and beautiful, she killed” (97). No more than a face and without a
voice at this point in her life, these attributes “seem to be her defining
characteristics. As child and woman in one, she is seen (worth looking at) but not
heard” (Jowett 4), even as Louis begins to acknowledge Claudia’s development.
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Claudia’s silence attests the sociocultural fact that, “[l]ike many women through
history, she has no voice” (Jowett 4). Claudia is an important (albeit marginalized)
aspect of the novel, yet Interview with the Vampire is ultimately dictated by Louis:
“Rice’s vampires are compulsive storytellers, but Claudia, the ultimate
[scopophilic] spectacle, is unable to break free of paternal narrative” (Auerbach
154-5). Endowing her with vampiric and narrative life, Louis must tell her story
within his patriarchal tale and from his own perspective.
Claudia is a part of their family for sixty-five years, a five-year-old even at
seventy. Although Claudia enjoys her gifts during the brief period one might call
her childhood, Louis’s depiction of her as a perpetual child problematizes her
inevitable mental maturation; not just a flat character (as Rice’s other female
figures in Interview with the Vampire are depicted), Claudia psychologically
develops only to be forever imprisoned in the body of a toddler. Louis realizes
Claudia begins to mature intellectually and sexually, as “more and more her doll-
like face
seemed to possess two totally aware adult eyes, and innocence seemed lost
somewhere with neglected toys and the loss of a certain patience. There was
something dreadfully sensual about her lounging on the settee in a tiny nightgown
of lace and stitched pearls; she became an eerie seductress, her voice…womanish”
(100-1). She is simultaneously regarded as woman and child, a woman-child who is
the exhibitionist object of Louis’s masculine scopophilic gaze.
Claudia’s eventual resentment stems not only from her jealousy of Lestat’s
knowledge, but also from her inability to mature physically. She desires the power
attained via existential epistemophilia and, equally important, the body of a nubile,
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adult woman. As Hoosain notes, the “most significant feature of her anger is that
she wants to be looked upon with desire. She no longer wants to feel like a freak of
nature. Claudia wants to be gazed at and wants to be the product of The Gaze”
(102). She condemns her makers and desires sexual freedom: “‘Snatching me from
mortal hands like two grim monsters in a nightmare fairy tale, you idle, blind
parents! Fathers!...Six more years, seven, eight . . . I might have had that shape!’
Her pointed finger flew at Madeleine [the woman who becomes her vampiric
companion]…‘To give immortality in this hopeless guise, this helpless form!’” (Rice
259). As a result, Hoosain reads Claudia’s exhibitionism as “Rice…pandering to the
normative idea that the woman with infantilised desires seeks this gratuitous
attention. Such a woman wants to be objectified; she wants to be the object of lust
and will kill if necessary to achieve this sense of accomplishment” (102). Although
active in her desire to acquire a sexually mature form—through Madeleine
“serv[ing] as an avatar of Claudia’s desires” (Hoosain 104)—Claudia is portrayed as
the masochistic exhibitionist who relies on the male gaze to compensate for her
unmet womanly sexual needs.
Claudia’s suppressed sexuality can be read as monstrous or horrific—pedophilic
intercourse is desired but never attainable because she is victimized by permanent
physical infantilization.
Additionally, Claudia’s entreaties to hunt with Louis can be read as soliciting
sex when she says, “‘Kill with me tonight,’ she whispered as sensuously as a lover”
(Rice 110). Indeed, Louis refers to their relationships in incestuous and erotic
terms: “Father and Daughter. Lover and Lover” (100), and he also calls her his
“bride” (109). They love each other desperately and their relationship is founded
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upon compassion and the desire for equality, united against Lestat in their mutual
hatred of him. Their relationship does not last, though, once she notices the
attraction between Louis and Armand; fearing being left alone and unable to fend
for herself because of her child’s body, Claudia demands her own female
companion.
The gendered sadomasochism between Claudia and Louis fluctuates, the
roles of sadist and masochist often exchanged; however, their relationship clearly
reinscribes sociocultural patriarchal power structures. Their pedophilic
relationship is imbalanced due to age difference and experience acquired: Louis is
an older male who has indulged in the carnal pleasures of (human) life while
Claudia is forever ignorant of sexual satiation due to her imprisonment in a child’s
form. She cannot act on her sexual impulses, lacking the agency of physical
maturation and knowledge about womanhood. She is physically weaker than her
vampiric parents, and must rely on her father for withheld information about her
vampiric origins. Additionally, Louis as mother wishes to guard her from the
wicked Lestat, assuming a both maternal and paternal protective role that
suffocates Claudia. Lorna Jowett reads him in this light as another father:
Louis’ role as parent/lover implies protection and possession…“I loved her,
must keep her” (Rice 127). Claudia, on the other hand, becomes in the later
stages of their relationship much more aware of his importance as lover and
companion than as father and begins to resent his fatherhood and all that it
implies. “Did you think I'd be your daughter for ever?” (Rice 225). Claudia is
all too aware of Louis' shortcomings as a lover, even in his self-awarded role
as her protector. (6)
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Always objectified as a doll—“That’s what she was. A magic doll” (101)—Claudia
thus resents this oppression, and so can only escape or retaliate against this role
through killing her father Lestat, embarking on an epistemophilic journey with her
mother/lover Louis, and then acquiring a maternal vampire companion of her
choosing.
After visiting the theater and seeing Louis drawn to Armand as a lover,
Claudia attempts to usurp paternal and patriarchal power in seeking her own
companion, a woman named Madeleine. Rice repeats the image of dolls and
women’s infantilization in her characterization of Madeleine as a doll maker, a
woman driven insane by the loss of her daughter—yet another depiction of females
as doomed or otherwise inferior. Madeleine’s sexually matured figure projects
Claudia’s own yearning for physical adulthood, but Madeleine also represents
Claudia’s desire for a maternal figure. Louis’s feminine compassion can be read as
maternal, yet Claudia ultimately possesses two male parents. Mute and confined in
the Lestat-Louis-Claudia family, her desperation for a female mother is expressed
in her obsession with women and children; Claudia begins to hunt families “one by
one” (103) and motherdaughter pairs when she plans revenge against Lestat.
Claudia’s (as well as Madeleine’s) wish for Madeleine’s vampirization thus fulfills
the roles both desire and require: Claudia needs a mother and Madeleine needs a
daughter.
Their relationship is the most beneficial for Claudia, as caring Madeleine
enables her to live the womanhood she was deprived of by Lestat and Louis.
Madeleine carves “out of a few sticks of wood, with her chisel and knife, a perfect
rocking chair, so shaped and proportioned for Claudia that seated in it by the fire,
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she appeared a woman” (271). Madeleine creates a miniature paradise in which
Claudia is endowed with agency, as the adult-sized “world crumbled and ceased to
exist at the boundary of the small space which soon became the length and breadth
of Claudia’s dressing room…the clumsy universe surrounding me [Louis], which
was now marked off and nullified by someone who had suffered in it, someone who
had suffered always, but who was not seeming to suffer now” (272). Finding
equality in her own (female) homosocial relationship, Claudia is not victimized by
Madeleine, their relationship not tainted by patriarchal gendered sadomasochistic
dynamics. Indeed, Sedgwick delineates culture’s different perceptions of male and
female homosociality, placing female homosocial ties on a more fluid continuum
including “the bond of mother and daughter…the bond of sister and sister,
women’s friendship…and the active struggles of feminism” (697), each of these
exhibited in their relationship.
However, although this egalitarian gynocentric relationship might indicate
Claudia’s satisfying liberation from a sadistic patriarchy, it is an illusory victory.
Madeleine must be transformed by Louis because “‘I haven’t the size, I haven’t the
strength! You saw to that when you made me!’” (258), Claudia supplicates. She
must rely on a man’s power to accrue her requested reward. More importantly, the
happy mother-daughter duo is killed by Armand and Lestat as punishment for
Claudia’s conceived crime—the attempted murder of Lestat—but really because
Armand views her as a rival for Louis’s attention. Because Claudia as female
“monster [is] in conflict with the family, the couple, and the institutions of
patriarch[y]” (Creed 61), both women are punished.
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A female in a male-dominated household, Claudia is automatically Other.
This stifling scenario is one of many factors that characterize her as the monstrous-
feminine. Claudia has the visage of a cherubic doll, yet she sadistically manipulates
her prey, which Louis finds “chilling” (Rice 99) and “wicked” (205). She is
simultaneously infantilized as a woman and sexualized as a child, and she is
supposed to happily accept these roles for the benefit of her parents. For example,
she desires her own child-sized coffin when she tires of sleeping with Louis, only to
cede to his desires—“‘I don’t want it if it hurts you…I’ll stay with you always’”—
when she realizes this “wounded” (101) him. However, Claudia ultimately refuses
to submit to these conditions of her domination, and so her sadistic and horrific
tendencies are exhibited when she plans to destroy Lestat. “No longer is it the
woman who must be protected from the monster; she is the monster” (Doane and
Hodges 424), as Claudia disrupts the family’s “fragile domestic tranquility” (Rice
104). As a result, her foiled attempts at patricide, in turn her transgression of
vampire law, are only rewarded with a cruel incendiary death. Her monstrous-
femininity is punished by a patriarchal penal system—Armand and Lestat—and the
“rage of a monstrous girl vampire against her infantilization and dependency in a
world defined by the fathers”
(Doane and Hodges 424) proves ineffective. Male retribution is permissible and
even desirable to consolidate homosocial relationships (Louis is forgiven for his
murderous torching and beheading of the Parisian vampires), yet female
vengeance (an attempted but not successful murder) is not.
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Conclusion
As Auerbach notes, “[f]or the Claudia who will always look like a doll,
vampirism is no release from patriarchy, but a perpetuation of it until the end of
time” (154). While Hoosain reads Claudia’s masochistic exhibitionism as Rice’s
perpetuation of female oppression, Claudia’s unjust entrapment as woman-child
and her subsequent murder by Armand and
Lestat might also evince Rice’s condemnation of such rigid and unequal power
structures.
Katherine Ramsland’s biography of Rice cites the creation of Claudia as a
projection of her child Michele, who died at age five from leukemia. Claudia came
to engender more complex meaning than an homage to her daughter, as Rice
states: “The child vampire Claudia was physically inspired by Michele but she
ultimately became something else—a woman trapped in a child's body, robbed of
power, never knowing what it's like to really be a woman and make love. She
became a metaphor for a raging mind trapped in a powerless body. That’s really
how I see her” (21). Claudia’s curious disposition as a woman-child is thus a
double-edged sword, tyrannical patriarchy tragically inescapable and ultimately
fatal.
While Rice does offer a more complex spectrum of sadomasochism, she
conversely seems to replicate essentialist gender traits which result in females’
powerlessness. Because the pairings of Lestat/Louis and Armand/Louis are the
focus of the novel, whereas Madeleine and Claudia are killed and there is no
allusion to a homoerotic lesbian relationship between them, “the power
relationships between men and women [or women and women] appear to be
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dependent on the power relationships between men and men” (Sedgwick 711), and
women are objectified for men’s homosocial pleasure in fiction as in fact.
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Chapter Two: Chastely Courting Pain
Reinscribing Patriarchal Values in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight
Series
When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options.
How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that
beloved one?
If your life was all you had to give to your beloved, how could you
not give it?
Stephenie Meyer
Breaking Dawn
Despite the vampire’s historical role as the embodied transgression of cultural
mores, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga hosts creatures of the night (and now day)
representing conservative rather than progressive gender politics: “In
contradistinction to the representation of the vampire figure as a threat to
whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality…Twilight constructs a new breed of
vampire that promotes and perpetuates, rather than undercuts, these norms”
(Wilson 26). By falling in love with his (white lower-middle-class heterosexual
female) human victim, Meyer’s (white upper-middle-class heterosexual male)
vampire affirms, codes, constructs, and reinscribes a rigidly heteronormative society
with its accompanying patriarchal power structures and prescribed gender roles.
Although Meyer’s Edward Cullen provides “a stark, even comical, contrast to Lord
Byron’s Augustus Darvell” (see page 1), it may be argued he is the more dangerous
of the two, as his innocuous façade (sparkly, handsome, and celibate) makes
cultural misogyny appear non-threatening and even welcome.
Narrated predominantly through the voice of teenager Isabella (Bella) Swan,
the four novels that comprise the Twilight series—Twilight, Eclipse, New Moon, and
Breaking Dawn— chronicle the human protagonist’s love for the vampire Edward
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Cullen and the subsequent dangers the couple face due to both Bella’s humanness,
and, later in the series, her daughter’s presumed vampirism. Though Bella’s and
Edmund’s love is mutual, their unequal roles—his physical superiority, economic
wealth, and immortality—privilege Edward as dominant and Bella as submissive,
which, in these texts, correlates to the respective roles of sadist and masochist.
Throughout the four-volume recounting of their relationship, Edward exerts
scopophilic and epistemophilic power over Bella, and he polices Bella’s sexuality in
order to control his own carnivorous and carnal cravings. In turn, Bella expresses her
undying (pun intended) devotion to Edward through a constricting cocktail of
passivity, powerlessness, selfloathing, and self-abuse. Bella desires death, or, more
precisely, she desires living death, as it seems the only means of liberation from her
cumbersome female/human body, and it offers her a measure of agency—albeit via
self-sacrifice, submission to Edward’s power, and, by the series’ denouement,
conformity to traditional female roles of married monogamy and motherhood.
This chapter begins with an examination of the violence directed toward Bella
by and because of her two lovers, Jacob and Edward, as well as her self-inflicted
abuse. I argue that the direct linkage between violence and love is indicative of rape
culture and cultural misogyny, and it promotes the cultural cliché that women really
mean “yes” when they say “no.” Next, two sadomasochistic pairings—Bella and
Edward, Bella and Jacob (the pseudo-werewolf)—are examined in terms of the
Freudian beating fantasy, scopophilia and epistemophilia, and masochistic-sadistic
inversion; my analysis explicates the series’ symbiotic sadomasochistic relationships
as devices for structuring power. The chapter concludes with a discussion of child-
women, analyzing Bella’s infantilization by Edward and, more particularly, the
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sexualization of the child Renesmee, the hybridized by-product of Edward and
Bella’s miscegenation.
Violent Love: Hurting Bella and Bella Hurting
If I couldn’t scream, how could I tell them to kill me? All I wanted was to die.
To never have been born…Let me die, let me die, let me die.
Stephenie Meyer
Breaking Dawn
Each of the four Twilight novels conforms to the same plot: Bella is mortally
endangered, and Edward rescues her moments before she succumbs to human
death. Increasingly, over the course of each novel and the series in its entirety,
mortal danger and its accompanying physical violence result because of her
relationship with Edward, who, at the end of each novel, satisfyingly rescues her.
Bella’s traumatic, masochistic repetition of enacted violence becomes productive of
a sense of self that finds value through pain and pleasure in rescue and praise. As
Massé notes, “gender roles teach the masochist that her influence over others will
continue to be through her helplessness” (49); by “pleasing the beloved, she [the
masochist] makes herself
‘indispensable’ and seeks to ‘bind the beloved to [her] through guilt’” (49-50).
Bella’s need for a
“perpetual savior” (Twilight 166) articulates a patriarchal narrative in which males
(Edward and Jacob) function as the source of and protectors against overwhelming
violence, normalizing female and male roles as victim and victimizer, respectively.
Additionally, Bella’s personal characteristics (her injurious clumsiness, her
lack of selfworth outside her relationship with Edward, her eager willingness to
endure subjugation to the “superior” Edward) disturbingly and repeatedly evoke
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violence against women as acceptable, even desirable. Problematically, love and
violence become inseparable. Though the series is predominantly pro-abstinent,
sexual violence is coded into Bella’s interactions with her romantic interests,
perpetuating rape culture and women’s victimization. Yet, not only is romantic love
the original source of most of the external violence Bella experiences, but Bella
deliberately and repeatedly injures herself when denied this love; through self-
abuse, she hopes to force Edward’s return. Violence/abuse and love, depicted
through repetitive incidents of pain and pleasure, are intimately linked in the
Twilight series, confirming the sadomasochistic underpinnings of Meyer’s novels.
A Damsel in Distress: Saving Bella from Others
Much Twilight scholarship reads the series as a product and perpetuation of
rape culture, and Bella’s relationships with Edward and Jacob (in addition to other
female characters’ relationships with their male mates) both illustrate and promote
abusive relationships as romantic, and, more disturbingly, encourage violence
against women. As Frann Michel avers, “these male characters’ behavior toward the
women they ostensibly love encompasses not only physical violence and threats of
violence, but also stalking, insults, deception, economic manipulation, and other
assertions of dominance and control” (3), all of which endanger Bella and even kill
many of Twilight’s other female characters.
Bella’s choice of love object places her at excessive physical risk. Edward’s
lust for Bella’s blood, his desire to kill her, and his supernatural strength are all
unavoidable factors which expose her to potential or real harm. As Hila Shachar
explicates in her article “A PostFeminist Romance: Love, Gender, and Intertextuality
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in Stephenie Meyer’s Saga,” Twilight “naturalizes the use of masculine physical
power and masculine brutality in various ways, such as the supernatural (it’s not his
fault he hurts me, he’s just supernaturally strong)” (57). Here, sexual difference is
coded in terms of power, males and Edward equated with brawn while females and
Bella are essentially weak, gender dynamics exacerbated by the couple’s added
imbalance stemming from their respective vampirism and humanity. In addition,
aside from Edward’s omnipresent predatory nature (most apparent when his eyes
are black), Bella’s exposure to his vampire world creates new hazards not
encountered in her human world, all of them notably violent in nature. However,
Edward acts as protector against the very violence his relationship with Bella
engenders, and, indeed, his role as protector depends upon this violence.
Perversely, the violent underpinnings of the relationship become the source of the
series’ romance, as Carrie Platt argues in “Cullen Family Values: Gender and Sexual
Politics in the Twilight Series”: The “central tension that drives the plot forward—
that of Edward as both predator and protector of Bella—relies upon and reinforces
regressive ideologies of romantic relationships…[and] gender difference” (Platt 72).
Women—so the story seems to go—interpret displays of masculine strength, either
aggressive or protective, as expressions of romantic interest and loving affection.
On the surface, Edward Cullen seems a good choice as love object due to the
fact that he comes from a family of “vegetarian” (Twilight 188) vampires. Because
the Cullens subsist solely on animal blood, they are an anomaly among other
vampires. Yet, as a result, the Cullens’ visitations by carnivorous vampires dispose
Bella as prey. The driving action of Twilight revolves around Bella’s pursuit by James,
a “sadistic vampire, intent on torturing to her death” (462), who violently breaks her
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bones, renders her unconscious by flinging her across a room, and bites her before
Edward destroys him. Her encounter with James reads as metaphorical rape, his
vampiric tracking (stalking) and brutal (dental) penetration evocative of the series’
vampiric/male physical and sexual violence. James follows conventional
characterizations of the vampiric figure “where the vampire is coded as rapist”
(Wilson 123). Almost twice raped figuratively and literally by lascivious males (one
vampiric, the others human) in the first novel alone, Bella’s helplessness epitomizes
the series’ victimization of women through violence, resulting in either death from
or salvation by a male. Although Bella could have easily died in the encounter with
James, Edward saves her, yet encourages her to inform family and friends that her
astounding injuries are due to her lack of coordination: “‘You fell down two flights of
stairs and through a window…You have to admit, it could happen’” (459).
Disturbingly, this echoes real-life domestic violence, wherein the beaten often lies
about the abuse, blaming it instead on an “accident.”
Bella is almost run over by a car, almost gang-raped, and then brutally
beaten by a carnivorous and cruel vampire; Twilight is only the beginning of Bella’s
violent adventures, as the series relies upon her placement in perilous
predicaments, enduring physical and emotional pain, to propel the plot forward. In
New Moon, a bloody paper cut renders Bella an enticing snack for the otherwise kind
Cullens, who become “six suddenly ravenous vampires” (29); later, two angry
vampires named Victoria and Laurent attempt to kill her in revenge for the death of
their leader (James). Victoria continues her vendetta against Bella in Eclipse, siring
an army of murderous vampires to track and attack the always already vulnerable
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Bella. And, in Breaking Dawn, the lives of Bella and her child are first threatened by
pseudo-werewolves and then by Volturi vampires.
Although Gothic novels, from their inception, have always depicted the
virtuous female as sexual prey and potential victim of violence, it is important to
note, in the Female Gothic, neither rape nor violence actually occurs (it is only
threatened), while, in the Male Gothic, rape and torture are almost always singular
events—that is, they occur once and are never repeated
(unlike de Sade’s fictions and unlike sadomasochistic ritual). In contrast, within
Meyer’s Twilight series, violence (both sexual and otherwise) is not just threatened,
but is enacted repeatedly, securely linking Meyer’s novels to sadomasochism. A
further distinction lies in the fact that, in the majority of Gothic novels, the male love
interest is never violent or abusive; indeed, he is sympathetic, emotional, caring—
and this is true in both the Male and Female
Gothic. However, as we shall see, the two love interests in Meyer’s series—Edward
Cullen and Jacob Black—frequently treat the heroine violently and aggressively;
indeed, violence and aggression become synonymous with love.
Love that Hurts: Bella’s Romantic Relationships
As noted above, Twilight’s overwhelming violence toward women is not
simply relegated to antagonistic outside forces, but it also plays an integral part in
Bella’s intimate relationships with Edward and Jacob. Discussing violence in
Twilight, Anne Torkelson summarizes rape culture as “support[ing] male-female
power imbalances and even promot[ing] violence against women through a
multitude of rape myths, such as that victims are responsible for what happens to
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them and that violence against women by men is acceptable because ‘boys will be
boys’” (211). Equally problematic is the fact that Twilight depicts love as founded
upon violence. As Wilson argues, Edward’s “romantic heroism certainly involves a
violent type of love—a ‘bruised-lip syndrome’…—that is variously represented as
restraining, containing, and hurting Bella” (123), and Jacob’s wolf-man embraces
and probing kisses equally demonstrate rough love.
Since Jacob’s relationship with Bella is never sexually consummated, it is
perhaps best to begin with him. In Eclipse, Jacob kisses Bella against her will. While
stolen kisses hardly constitute a crime, this is much more than the simple planting
of a friendly kiss:
His lips crushed mine, stopping my protest. He kissed me angrily, roughly, his
other hand gripping tight around the back of my neck, making escape
impossible. I shoved against his chest with all my strength, but he didn’t even
seem to notice…I grabbed at his face, trying to push it away, failing again. He
seemed to notice this time, though, and it aggravated him. His lips forced
mine open. (330-1)
At this point, Bella clearly does not wish to breach their platonic relationship,
resisting Jacob’s aggression by unsuccessfully punching him. This results in her
broken hand (another injury sustained in a so-called loving relationship). Despite her
retaliation, however, she quickly forgives him, and, later in the same novel, when
Jacob kisses Bella again, this time with her permission, she suddenly realizes she is
in love with him.
This chain of events implies that a woman’s “no” really means “yes,” that
Jacob must act the part of aggressor in order for Bella to realize her true feelings for
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him. Violence, then, is viewed as mere foreplay; it forces the recognition of love.
Female unwillingness is construed by the male—and by the female—as mere
response to the coy cultural display of feminine passive sexuality, which must be
forcibly overcome by male assertiveness and aggression; as Wilson notes, this type
of “loving” aggression by men is meant to counter what Rosalind Coward refers to
as ‘the ultimate expression of passive [female] sexuality’” (Wilson 123). In other
words, Bella’s enactment of female sexual passivity is assumed to be a cultural
gesture that requires a counter gesture (male aggression) so she may get what “she
really wants.”
While Jacob’s love for Bella manifests itself in “forced kisses and vice-like
hugs” (Wilson 123), Edward’s “loving violence” toward Bella ostensibly occurs in
relation to his desire to protect her from himself. (Paradoxically, violence is used to
prevent violence.) In their abstinent yet titillating encounters, Edward physically
restrains Bella in order to curb his desire for her blood and to prevent his
accidentally killing her. He essentially polices her sexuality, but his violent restraint
is coded as erotic. The first time they kiss, Edward “pushed my face back” (Twilight
282), from the beginning evincing the couple’s violent sexuality. They refrain from
sexual consummation until Breaking Dawn, but their three-novel prolonged foreplay
relies on Edward’s violent control over himself and Bella. As Anthea Taylor theorizes,
“Edward’s difficulty sublimating his own desire invokes an aggressive masculine
sexuality, for which Bella is seen responsible; she routinely apologizes for her scent
and promises to avoid doing anything to ‘provoke’ him, reinscribing the ideologically
loaded notion that women should be responsible for (the effects of) men’s desire”
(39).
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The sexual act itself resembles rape and beating, once the virginal couple
marries and consummates their love in Breaking Dawn. Violent, first-time sex on
their honeymoon results in “large purplish bruises” (89) all over Bella’s body and
Edward’s biting a pillow to prevent accidentally vampirizing her (yet another
indication of the ever-present danger of their relationship). Though Bella makes light
of and masochistically revels in her coital contusions, “we might read this encounter
as leaving the tell-tale signs of domestic violence—signs that women often need to
hide” (Wilson 128). Bella examines her bruised body and dismisses the severity of
Edward’s physical violence, attributing the bumps and bruises to her fragility and
predisposition to injury:
I’d definitely had worse. There was a faint shadow across one of my
cheekbones, and my lips were a little swollen, but other than that, my face
was fine. The rest of me was decorated with patches of blue and purple. I
concentrated on the bruises that would be the hardest to hide—my arms and
my shoulders. They weren’t so bad. My skin marked up easily…Of course,
these were just developing. I’d look even worse tomorrow. That would not
make things any easier. (95-6).
She refers to the experience as “amazing” (92) despite her bruises, seeking to hide
the conspicuous marks of Edward’s sexual violence “so that she can get him to
‘decorate’ her some more” (Wilson 128). As McGeogh notes, Bella “could not discern
between pleasure and pain during sex” (93) and “deemphasizes any pain caused by
sex to keep Edward from feeling guilty for hurting her” (92-3), self-abnegating to
please her controlling mate. During their honeymoon, a “second romp results in
another scene that eroticizes abusive sex through violent images such as more
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bruises, shredded lingerie strewn across the sheets, and a destroyed headboard”
(Torkelson 213). Bella’s dismissal of the pain relative to their intimate encounters,
while emphasizing the pleasurable aspects, “perpetuates the rape myths that
sexual violence is sexy and desired by women” (213). Predictably, the end result of
unprotected honeymoon sex is pregnancy and childbirth. Once Bella becomes fatally
pregnant, the fetus distends her stomach and rapidly saps her life. She is enervated
to the point of death, her spine cracking and heart barely beating. Her violent labors
render her a “broken, bled-out, mangled corpse” (New Moon 355), requiring
emergency vampirization before her heart stops beating.
Once Bella becomes a vampire, fragile, breakable human Bella is no more.
However, her immortal transformation is more than simply a physical change in
status—it is a metaphorical one as well, as Bella is now married and a mother.
Wilson emphasizes the vampire/human and male/female binaries by noting “[t]he
solution for sexualized violence is thus not changing the actions of males or the
construction of masculinity, but changing females into vampires, who…follow the
dictates of married monogamy—the true safety net for females according to the
Twilight saga” (Wilson 127). Sexual violence, then, at least in terms of Meyer’s
fictional world, halts once a woman becomes wife and mother. (Of course, in real
life, this would not be the case.) Heterosexual normativity and conformity to
culturally-constructed gender roles thus presumably act as safeguards against
sexual violence and predation. Now endowed with the ability to mentally project a
tangible shield, Bella’s new vampiric power is only a façade of agency as it affirms,
rather than subverts, traditional femininity, as Shachar notes:
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While Bella is “victorious” from one perspective, from another, this is false
victory that simply elevates her often morbid and suicidal willingness to
destroy herself in the service of others throughout the novels into a mystical
veneration of feminine selfsacrifice…One of the most important legacies of
such ideas of femininity is of course that to this day, women are still defined
in relation to, and in the service of, others; most commonly, their children and
husbands. From this perspective, Bella is not simply a manifestation of
traditional nineteenth-century ideologies of femininity, but also, a typical
heroine of romance. (153-4)
Bella’s gained strength is both reward and result of the pain endured at Edward’s
hands; Bella as Massé’s masochistic martyr does achieve her happily ever after,
although her power paradoxically confirms her positioning in a subservient and
powerless role. Only by conforming to heterosexual marriage and motherhood—
females’ appropriate domestic role in patriarchy— does Bella free herself from
further physical or emotional harm associated with “love.” Although the series
resolves happily with all enemies defeated and Bella indestructibly strong, her
constant victimization derived from breakable human femininity and Edward’s
vampirism enacts and enforces patriarchal gender roles. As a result, “the message
that Meyer implies is that men must step in, dominate, and protect and women
should capitulate, understanding that it is for their own good” (Donnelly 186)
because helpless Bella exerts no agency until her vampirization, which is, in and of
itself, problematic as it requires capitulation to prescribed essentialist feminine
roles.
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A Blade to Her Wrists: Bella and Self-Inflicted Pain
In New Moon, the second novel in the Twilight series, Edward attempts to
break off his relationship with Bella, in order to protect her from him and others of
his vampiric kind. He does so by telling her she is not “good enough” (70) for him.
As a self-immolating character who needs Edward for survival, she immediately
thinks, “How well I knew that I wasn’t good enough for him” (70). As Chancer notes,
sadomasochism is based on “[t]he establishment of a hierarchical division between
self and other that rests on the attribution of superiority to the sadist and of
inferiority to the masochist. The sadist sets up an unequal relationship with the
masochist in which the former is powerful and good, the latter powerless and bad”
(55). This is certainly the case with Edward and Bella, but it does not adequately
explain Bella’s self-abuse in Edward’s absence.
Deprived of Edward’s company, Bella intentionally places herself in repeated
danger, engaging in suicidal escapades—lying down in a remote section of the
forest in cold rain, conversing with strange men, riding and crashing a motorcycle,
jumping off a cliff—to cope with his loss and resurrect his memory. Pain is the only
way to retain her relationship with Edward; she has no other mementos of his
existence. Early on their relationship, Bella recognizes this correlation between her
exposure to danger and his presence, so contemplates intentionally endangering
herself: “If I had to, I supposed I could purposely put myself in danger to keep him
close. . . .” (Twilight 211). After he leaves her, she follows him through the dark
forest in pouring rain, telling herself, “If I stopped looking for him, it was over” (73).
Shortly thereafter, unable to find him, she succumbs to despair, unwilling and
unable to be rescued—though rescued she is, but not by Edward. This occurs in
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September, and for the next four months—October, November, December, and
January—her life has no meaning whatsoever, indicated by the blank pages
following each month’s title. Her psychological wellbeing and sense of self-identity
thus rely on his presence, as her narrative ceases in a voiceless passing of time (85-
92). Bella’s lack of self, or perception of her lack further attests to her “‘blankness’…
that she has no concept of self-identity or belonging without Edward…Bella is a
primary example of…traditional passive femininity as a ‘self-less’ being who cannot
attain an identity or a place within the world of experience without being defined in
relation to the masculine” (Shachar 152-3). Her life possesses meaning only when
Edward is around. Without Edward, Bella realizes “I wasn’t the heroine anymore,
that my story was over” (106), and figuratively dies without her beloved.
Once she awakens—as the chapter entitled “Waking Up” (93) delineates—
from her selfinduced coma, she flocks to Port Angeles with her classmate Jess,
where she encounters a group of menacing men reminiscent of those who
attempted to rape her in Twilight. Repeating her trauma by approaching a stranger
resembling one of her former attackers, Bella realizes “this was not the terrible man
who had tried to hurt me almost a year ago,” causing her to “suffer a curious
sensation of disappointment” (114). Jess asks, “Are you suicidal?” (110), but Bella’s
masochistic nature justifies her action; she rationalizes: “It wasn’t like I was taking a
blade to my wrists” (111). Her venture into promised pain is rewarded when she
gains the pleasure of hearing Edward’s voice in her head: “It was his voice” (111).
Although this voice cautions her against danger, it paradoxically rewards her at the
same time, encouraging her pursuit of other life-threatening situations.
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Bella accelerates her campaign of self-destruction when it becomes clear
Edward has no intention of returning to Forks. She speaks of their agreement,
wherein she promises to keep herself safe, yet desires to rebel at her own expense:
“It made feel silly for ever worrying about keeping my promise. Where was the logic
in sticking to an agreement that had already been violated by the other party? Who
cared if I was reckless and stupid? There was no reason to avoid recklessness, no
reason why I shouldn’t get to be stupid” (125). Soon, she finds “there are just all
kinds of ways to be reckless, and I only now had my eyes open to them” (126).
Opening Pandora’s Box, she acquires a motorcycle—“Reckless and stupid. Those
were Charlie’s two very favorite words to apply to motorcycles” (127)—and is bent
on crashing it. Of course, she hears the “angry, honey-sweet voice” (187) of Edward
ordering her to stop, but she does not, requiring seven stiches in her scalp after her
resulting wreck. She compares the recklessness— the danger, the excitement of
possible pain—to a previous experience with Edward: “. . . it reminded me of a past
life, flying through the thick forest without a road, piggyback while he ran” (190). As
always, when physically hurt, Bella attempts to minimize the damage: “‘Trust me.
I’m an easy bleeder. It’s not nearly as dire as it looks’” (190).
Next, she deliberately wanders into the forest alone, encountering the
vampire Laurent, one of James’s coven. She greats him with “surprised pleasure”
(235); she notes, “fear would have made more sense, but all I felt was an
overwhelming satisfaction,” as the presence of a vampire proves “he [Edward] did
exist” (236). Throughout the encounter, she “hears” Edward speaking to her,
coaching her response, until Jacob and his pseudo-werewolf pack can rescue her
(again a damsel in distress rescued by a male). For the finale of her escapist
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endeavors, Bella attempts unaccompanied cliff-diving, though she is completely
inexperienced: “I imagined the utter freedom of the fall. . . . I imagined the way
Edward’s voice would have sounded in my head—furious, velvet, perfect. . . .” (356).
She smugly notes, “I knew that this was the stupidest, most reckless thing I had
done yet. The thought made me smile. The pain was already easing, as if my body
knew that Edward’s voice was just seconds away” (358). Caught by the current, she
hears Edward’s voice, which makes her “so happy” she determines to drown: “I
ignored his words and concentrated on the sound of his voice. Why would I fight
when I was so happy where I was?…I was content. I’d forgotten what real happiness
felt like” (361). Again, Jacob saves her.
Bella’s self-inflicted violence serves several functions in terms of self-identity:
It physically enacts her emotional pain at the loss of Edward. It replicates the
pleasurable pain experienced in her relationship with Edward. It offers contact with
him and connection to him. (Conversely, despite the fact that we have been told
repeatedly Edward cannot “read” Bella’s mind, readers are led to believe Bella really
hears his Edward’s voice—as Jane Eyre hears Mr. Rochester’s—he is somehow
telecommunicating through space and time, cautioning her, listening to her
thoughts. Whether Bella actually hears Edward is not the point; she thinks she hears
him.) Her self-abuse also functions as an appeal for the producer of pain (Edward) to
return: If I hurt myself, if I make him feel guilty, maybe he’ll return. New Moon
depicts Bella as the masochist who “demand[s] that others recognize and love her
precisely for her nonassertion.
Her silent suffering becomes her claim to fame” (Massé 48). Bella Swan’s actions
speak loudly.
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Sadomasochism in the Twilight Series
Of course he wasn’t interested in me…I wasn’t interesting. And he
was.
Interesting…and brilliant…and mysterious…and perfect…and
beautiful…
Stephenie Meyer
Twilight
In the Twilight series, Meyer paints a highly conservative social milieu, which
—though not necessarily consistent with or representative of the views of the
majority of twenty-firstcentury Americans—nonetheless articulates the views of a
highly visible and vocal portion of the American population. Generally, those views
sanction a glancing nod toward female equality (though certainly not toward gender
equality), but ultimately seek to legitimize and restore so-called family values,
based on nostalgic views of gender roles, the family, and the community.
Thus, Bella Swan seems—at least on the surface—a reasonably independent
and selfsufficient young woman, driving her pick-up truck, wearing jeans and a
hoodie, acting the part of mother to her own flighty mother. Bella even voices a wish
for equality with Edward, insisting “‘I can’t always be Lois Lane…I want to be
Superman, too’” (Twilight 474). However, in attempting to reconceive the Gothic
“damsel in distress” in a contemporary setting, Meyer is forced to locate her heroine
within twenty-first-century America—not eighteenth-century England—and therein
lies, so I would argue, the underlying cause of Twilight’s violence and
sadomasochism, for, unlike the eighteenth-century heroine who is severely
constricted in terms of personal agency, Bella Swan has choices.
Bella can date nice boys (or nice girls)—like “the overly helpful, chess club type”
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(Twilight 16) Eric or the “cute, baby-faced boy” (25) Mike—or not-so-nice ones, like
domineering Edward and aggressive Jacob. Bella can engage in premarital sex or
wait until marriage. Bella can decide whether or not to attend college, or when and
if she wants to marry. Bella’s choice is to let Edward decide, despite half-hearted
protestations on her part. For instance, Bella argues against early marriage,
claiming she does not follow traditional gender roles: “I’m not that girl, Edward. The
one who gets married right out of high school like some small-town hick who got
knocked up by her boyfriend!...People don’t just get married at eighteen! Not smart
people, not responsible, mature people! I wasn’t going to be that girl! That’s not
who I am. . . .” (Eclipse 27576). Nonetheless, Bella allows Edward to decide for her,
and she marries him at eighteen. While some part of her resists dominance—“‘So
you can ask for any stupid, ridiculous thing you want—like getting married—but I’m
not allowed to even discuss what I—” (443) (note she is cut off mid-sentence)—she
chooses to let Edward have the upper hand; her resentment becomes part of a
satisfying display of martyrdom.
To a large extent, then, Bella and Edward (and Bella and Jacob) engage in
contractual sadomasochism, as choice is involved; however, the choice also consists
of reproducing stereotypical gender roles, which also aligns it with sociocultural
sadomasochism. In essentially giving up her right to choose—or, rather, by ceding
that right to Edward—she gains selfidentity through martyrdom and through
performance of traditional feminine attributes. In the following sections, I analyze
the dyadic relationships between Edward/Bella and Jacob/Bella, arguing, in the
former pairing, Bella acts the part of masochist, and, in the latter pairing, the part of
sadist. As the violent nature of both sets of relations has already been established, I
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will look instead at the ways in which self-worth, control, scopophilia/epistemophilia,
and exhibitionism solidify the sadomasochistic relationships in Meyer’s Twilight
series.
Not “Good Enough”: Bella as Masochist
Bella Swan perceives her world in dichotomous terms—you/me,
talented/average, vampire/human—which structure her self-evaluation and her
relationship with Edward. Her identity is constructed around these binaries, as she
describes herself an outsider among her peers, unattractive and jealous of beautiful
women, and clumsy and weak. Her mantra is “I’d never fit in” (Twilight 10).
Additionally, instead of appreciating her unique mental immunity against Edward’s
telepathic powers, Bella is conversely disappointed in and critical of herself:
“My mind doesn’t work right? I’m a freak?…I’d always suspected as much, and it
embarrassed me to have it confirmed” (Twilight 181). Her self-denigration forms the
foundation of her relationship with Edward Cullen, the “beautiful boy” (20) whose
“absurdly handsome” looks
(27), superior physicality, wealth, and immortality, render him an object of Bella’s
admiration. When Edward—initially attracted to her floral-smelling blood—exhibits
an interest in Bella, it engenders both self-loathing (through comparison to him and
his family) and self-worth (as this vampiric god has chosen her) on Bella’s part. The
fact that she is female and he is male further creates a power binary. As Wilson
notes, “the vampire/human dyad that the novel circulates around is revealed to
represent not only immortal and strong/weak binaries, but also that of male/female”
(75). Strikingly similar to Severin’s description of Venus, Bella constantly refers to
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Edward as a “perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble”
(Twilight 260);
“cool as stone” (261) to the touch, he is her personal deity, the vampiric Adonis to
Severin’s Venus. Also like Venus, Edward’s coldness renders him aloof, even cruel to
Bella when he is physically evasive and emotionally distant.
Recognizing the violent impossibility of their relationship, Edward alludes to
the presence of sadomasochistic elements, oddly depicting himself as a masochistic
animal of prey. They profess their love for each other—“‘And so the lion fell in love
with the lamb’”—then Bella denigrates herself as “‘a stupid lamb’” and Edward
admits he is “‘a sick, masochistic lion’”
(Twilight 274). He views himself as masochist simply because he is a vampire who
should kill Bella for her blood, but, instead, denies himself this pleasure; however,
his choice of analogy
(the lion and the lamb) and his domineering actions suggest rather the role of
sadist. Although
Bella consumes him with carnal desire, Edward does not “‘want to be a monster’”
(Twilight 187).
Yet his words are incongruous with his actions, feigned masochism masking his
various sadistic powers exerted over Bella. He might say he does not want to hurt
her—“‘Bella, I couldn’t live with myself if I ever hurt you. You don’t know how it’s
tortured me’” (Twilight 273)—yet he is the source of violence Bella experiences
throughout the series, endangering her life while also paternally restricting her
freedom and sexuality.
Tison Pugh reads Edward as initially assuming a sadistic guise, only to later
reveal his true masochistic identity; for Pugh, Edward is von Sacher-Masoch’s
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masochistic initiator. My reading of Meyer’s novels suggests the opposite: Edward’s
masochistic platitudes are just that— his actions belie his words; he assumes a
masochistic façade only to conceal his true sadistic identity. Even if Edward does
play the masochist at certain times, it is important to acknowledge that, within
male-female sadomasochism, the male always retains dominance over the “play,”
regardless of which role is taken. Thus, even when he leaves Bella for her own good,
Edward is the one who makes the decision. In addition, I would argue Edward
primarily exhibits sadistic, rather than masochistic, tendencies. Contrasting Pugh’s
position, Michel sees Edward as a sadistic villain who, “in addition to reminding Bella
verbally about his predatory danger…demonstrates his physical power by tearing up
trees and sneaks into Bella’s bedroom to watch her sleep. He follows her on outings
with her friends and has his siblings keep watch on her house. He forbids her to see
Jacob and tampers with her car to prevent her from disobeying his wishes” (3).
Classifying him as a “batterer” (or, in Freudian terms, a beater) who inflicts intimate
partner violence, Miller argues these additional behaviors are also exhibited:
“jealousy; controlling behavior; quickly involving oneself in a relationship; unrealistic
expectations of one’[s] partner; blaming one’s partner for one’s own feelings; a
‘Jekyll/Hyde/ personality; and the use of any force during a conflict” (168-9). Pugh
further explicates the pair’s “mutually masochistic dynamics” (149), depicting
Edward as the masochist who derives pleasure from deferral; he cannot
consummate their love (and consume her) until she agrees to marry him in Breaking
Dawn. Yet this further indicates or can be read as another example of Edward’s
sadistic sway over Bella, his assertive abstinence critically curbing her voiced sexual
desire.
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Edward’s gendered scopophilia/epistemophilia, by dint of his being a male
looking at a female, is amplified by his vampirism, and his vampiric strength and
speed allow him to restrict (or protect) Bella. Indeed, their difference in strength is
highlighted throughout the series, as one wrong move could easily result in Bella’s
effortless death:
Our relationship couldn’t continue to balance, as it did, on the point of a knife.
We would fall off one edge or the other, depending entirely upon his decision,
or his instincts. My decision was made…and I was committed to seeing it
through. Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating,
than the thought of turning away from him. It was an impossibility. (Twilight
248)
Again, she is and perceives herself as passive in contrast with his activity; Edward
makes the decisions while Bella must conform to or be inevitably influenced by
them.
Perhaps their roles are essentially coded in terms of gender and reflect
gendered power structures because he is a superior vampire and she is an inferior
human, a binarism that replicates the cultural construct of superior male and
inferior female; regardless, their characterization as vampire and human
exacerbates sociocultural male sadism and female masochism. Wilson further
deconstructs the vampire/human binary in terms of male and female: “Edward’s
status as a vampire can be read as encapsulating the male privileges that
patriarchal society affords—he is the one…who has all the power. His word is law;
hers is only request” (75). Illustrated in Bella’s attempt at seducing Edward, she is
“not allowed to even discuss” (Eclipse 443) her desires, and his admonition silences
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her. Additionally, Edward’s injecting her with his venom for her vampirization
reaffirms the necessity of Bella’s dependence on males (and Edward); she is not
transformed by Alice, Rosalie, or Esme. Taylor also notes: The threat of (Bella’s)
death looms large in every erotically charged encounter in each narrative, but she is
not simply the vampire’s unwilling prey. In terms of the sire/sired dynamic, with
siring as the ultimate sadomasochistic act, Bella actually willingly embraces
transformation…While Edward articulates a fear of “losing control” in a physical
sense, and thereby damaging Bella, she is the active masochist seeking to “safely”
abandon herself’ (Benjamin, 1990: 64). Moreover, the “control, order, and boundary
that the master provides are essential to the erotic experience of submission”
(Benjamin, 1990: 64). (41)
Echoing the incestuous Electra complex (Edward is, after all, old enough to be her
father—or, rather, great-grandfather), martyred masochism, and the predator/prey
binary, Bella’s relationship with pedophilic Edward affirms Massé’s gendered
sadomasochism.
Edward’s superiority also manifests itself in the form of epistemophilic power
over Bella. When Bella is nearly gang-raped in Port Angeles, Edward finds her and
conveniently rescues her. As a result of Bella’s own epistemophilic questioning,
Edward admits he can read minds, though Bella’s thoughts are an impenetrable
anomaly to his psychic abilities. However, overcoming this impediment, he reads
the minds of others to detect Bella’s location or to steal bits of her conversations
with them. Using his epistemophilia as a GPS device, Edward keeps tabs on her
location throughout the entire series, implying that women require masculine
supervision and protection, which, in turn, reiterates the male-female binarism.
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However, Edward’s masculine scopophilia proves the most disconcerting, as Bella
responds to it with displays of feminine exhibitionism.
The Twilight series frames beauty—as seen and validated through the male
gaze—as a hallmark of feminine achievement, and Bella’s envy of attractive women
connotes her negative self-perception: She sees herself as less attractive and, thus,
less sexually desirable to men in contrast to other females; she describes herself as
“average, even for a human, almost shamefully plain” (New Moon 65). These
defining personal attributes readily predispose her toward jealousy of other women
and, paradoxically, toward masochistic exhibitionism. Interestingly, although Bella
views herself as “plain,” it is clear she is mistaken, as she immediately attracts the
attention of several male classmates, including Edward Cullen himself.
To some extent, this realistically reflects the discomfort many/most women
feel about their faces and bodies when compared to the air-brushed images of
women in magazines or the Botoxed, starved, and surgically-altered women on
television or in film. However, it also enacts the old-fashioned clichéd view of
feminine “modesty,” as well as the notion that female beauty, self-regard, and self-
identity have no validity unless sanctioned by a male. Bella’s selfabnegation speaks
to the prevalent cultural “fact that females are instructed that their role is to please
men via their submission to male desire and…the fact that females are framed as
objects of titillation for the male gaze” (Wilson 120). Edward proves the most
powerful purveyor of the approving male gaze—at least as far as Bella is concerned
—because he possesses personal beauty in the extreme (granting him the authority
to judge beauty in others), and because he finds the “plain” Bella an object of
desire.
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Bella’s introductory encounter with Edward occurs on her first day at Forks
High School. Noticing a group of “chalky pale” (Twilight 18) students segregated
from the rest of their peers, Bella examines in particular the youngest, the
“beautiful boy” (20) who is not romantically coupled with another. Though she is the
first to gaze at Edward, evaluating him as an object of desire, he catches her visual
appraisal of him and thenceforth gazes at her. While Bella’s initial gaze is sexually
coded and more aligned with Severin’s masochism, indicating interest in an
unknown and attractive Other, Edward’s “hostile, furious…antagonistic stare”
evinces a façade of frustrated condemnation toward her that veils his erotic arousal,
“suddenly [going] rigid in his seat” (23) as he stares at her. Unlike Rice’s vampires’
more endearing gaze and “vampire eyes,” “the fact that he ‘suddenly went rigid’
serves as an under-coded message that her presence is an excruciating turn-on”
(Wilson 118), Bella as the object and cause of his scopophilic erection.
After this initial phase of conversational scopophilia, however, Edward’s gaze
dominates. In their biology class, Bella is assigned to sit next to Edward, who “was
leaning away from [her], sitting on the extreme edge of his chair and averting his
face like he smelled something bad” (23). In response to his obvious aversion, Bella
smells her hair. This action mirrors Mulvey’s and Massé’s explication of the
masochistic, exhibitionist woman as groomed to be visually pleasing; Bella thinks
she is the cause of his dislike, so superficially examines the acceptance of her
physical appearance. Despite—or perhaps because of—Edward’s angry, relentless
stare, Bella recognizes “his face was absurdly handsome—with piercing, hate-filled
eyes”; she feels “a thrill of genuine fear” (27), which is nonetheless pleasurable.
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Much to Bella’s satisfaction, Edward’s gaze lingers solely on her, ignoring
others. Bella thus receives gratification from his exclusive attention. His gaze
literally captivates her: “I looked down at my book as soon as his eyes released
me…I couldn’t believe the rush of emotion pulsing through me—just because he’d
happened to look at me for the first time in a half-dozen weeks” (73-4). Once the
relation progresses, Edward watches Bella sleep—initially unbeknownst to her.
Rather than finding his predatory stalking alarming, she is “flattered” (Twilight 292).
His eyes as phallic organs may be interpreted as scopophilic penetration in their
otherwise sexually abstinent relationship. His breaking and entering to watch her
sleep becomes paternalistic as Twilight progresses, guarding Bella when she is in
mortal danger and pursued by enemy vampires. His scopophilia in this context then
takes “the controlling male gaze and render[s] it both protective and erotic—
Edward’s watchful ways keep Bella safe” (Wilson 120) because she is both a damsel
in constant distress and an object of desire.
“Every girl, and every Gothic heroine, learns that it is only in the mirror of his
regard that she exists” (Massé 90), yet a problem occurs with Edward’s constant
surveillance: Bella will age, while Edward will not, a fact she soon recognizes and
learns to fear. Culturally, while men can age and still be viewed as sexy and vital,
women cannot. As Wilson remarks, Twilight “upholds traditional notions about age,
suggesting that younger females are best paired with older males” (119). Although
a 100-year age gap exists between Bella and Edward, Edward remains a perpetually
youthful seventeen in looks, and Bella fears turning eighteen and becoming too old
for him, at least in terms of looks and beauty. At the beginning of New Moon, Bella
has a nightmare in which she has become her grandmother. Her “ancient, creased,
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and withered” (6) visage, a memento mori of her female aging, juxtaposes itself
against Edward’s masculine agelessness. Bella’s fear of aging and dying—of
outliving Edward—confirms our culture’s “obsession with youth…as entirely normal,
as something every female should desire” (Wilson 51). Bella articulates a cultural
fear (or reality)—as women age, the validating male gaze directs its attention
elsewhere; it reaffirms the sociocultural obsession with feminine sexual
attractiveness and, by extension, eternal youth. This issue is resolved only when
Bella becomes an ageless vampire, forever eighteen.
An interesting portrayal of the vampire/human dichotomy is depicted when
Bella observes herself in a mirror (ignoring the vampiric lore of non-reflection) after
her transformation. Bella’s voice—her narration—is still human; she perceives her
new self similarly to how she masochistically describes Edward and the Cullens—as
“a carving of a goddess” (403); she becomes her own Venus. She does not realize
the reflection is her own, and seeks to find her human attributes: “I stared at the
beautiful woman with the terrifying eyes, looking for pieces of me…and turned my
back on the strange and beautiful woman in the mirror” (405-6). For a moment,
Bella simultaneously exists as sadist and masochist, as Venus and Severin. In
addition, it seems Bella resolves the vampire/human binary in her ability to control
her newborn impulses to kill, hybridizing vampire and human characteristics in
herself and also in daughter Renesmee. If Bella’s vampiric transformation
metaphorically translates to acceptance of the roles of wife and mother, then she
becomes powerful in those roles, with her former (human) unmarried self in awe of
her newfound strength, yet with the (vampiric) wife/mother sympathetic to former
struggles. Vampire Bella is beautiful and strong, her human shortcomings erased,
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and she no longer denigrates herself: “As a human, I’d never been best at
anything…After eighteen years of mediocrity, I was pretty used to being average…
never quite fitting into my world. I was amazing now…It was like I had been born to
be a vampire…I had found my true place in the world, the place I fit” (Breaking
Dawn 523-4). While “vampire” codes to “male” throughout most of the series, it also
codes to “wife/mother” in Bella’s case.
Perhaps Bella’s humanity is grafted onto her vampirism, and, by extension,
her sadomasochistic roles (sadism toward Jacob and masochism toward Edward)
and even the series’ overarching gender inequality are also resolved through her
vampirization. Bella is no longer a damsel in distress, her sexuality no longer policed
by Edward nor her corporeal self in need of paternal protection. Edward no longer
exerts a sadistic role over Bella and she sees herself as his vampiric equal—“‘it just
seems logical . . . a man and woman have to be somewhat equal . . . as in, one of
them can’t always be swooping in and saving the other one. They have to save each
other equally” (Twilight 474). Though her vampiric agency is interpreted as
problematic (she becomes a vampire through married monogamy and maternity,
upholding traditional female roles), Bella’s masochism—her martyred submission to
Edward’s sadism and dying for him—pleasurably results in her happily ever after,
the contract fulfilled and roles of beater/biter and beaten/bitten dissolved.
“Within My Power”: Bella as Sadist
Massé cites the female masochist’s tendency to “appropriate the power of
the sadist”
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(51) as an “overt expression of the masochist’s need to see her own existence
confirmed through her effects on others” (50); she adds, “[t]he most overt
expression of the masochist’s need to see her own existence confirmed through her
effects on others is when her masochism temporarily becomes its active twin
instinct, sadism” (50). When Edward leaves her in New Moon, Bella becomes sadist,
projecting her need for psychological wholeness onto Jacob.
Similar to Edward’s and Bella’s relevant sadomasochistic roles (both are
symbiotic and highly relevant to both sadist and masochist), Bella’s and Jacob’s
roles are mutually dependent; her sadism is only expressed in relation to Jacob as
victim, when his otherwise alpha male/wolf status and independence is negated
through submission to Bella. Rather than their relationship reflecting sociocultural
sadomasochism in which Bella’s passivity reflects both traditional gender roles and
ingrained female masochism, Bella’s and Jacob’s sadomasochism is explicitly
contractual, with Bella as the initiator and Jacob illustrating Deleuzian masochism
through his pleasurable postponement of winning Bella’s love. Notably, Bella takes
on the role of cruel Venus, though this role, while granting her the power of the
sadist, also raises the question of her ultimate sadistic agency, particularly as she
models herself upon Edward’s sadistic eroticism.
After first meeting Edward and becoming curious about his inhuman abilities,
Bella seeks information about him and the Cullens from Jacob. Though quickly
maturing, Jacob is several years younger than Bella and culturally positioned as
Native American Other, both of which allow Bella to assume a position of relative
superiority. She deliberately exploits Jacob’s attraction to her by appropriating the
erotic objectification of Edward’s gaze: “I hoped that young Jacob was as yet
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inexperienced around girls, so that he wouldn’t see through my sure-tobe-pitiful
attempts at flirting…[I] tr[ied] to imitate that way Edward had of looking up from
underneath his eyelashes. It couldn’t have nearly the same effect, I was sure, but
Jacob jumped up willingly enough” (Twilight 122). Bella effectively imbibes and
reproduces Edward’s scopophilia/epistemophilia as a successful means of exerting
power, and Jacob readily submits to her flirtatious attentions. After Bella acquires
the knowledge she seeks concerning Edward, she is “extremely grateful to Jacob,
and eager to make him as happy as possible,” feeling guilty “knowing that [she]’d
used him” (127). However, this guilt diminishes as their relationship progresses
throughout the series, both characters vacillating between love and hate for each
other as Bella’s sadism informs Jacob’s masochism.
Once Edward leaves Bella in New Moon, she becomes best friends with Jacob,
spending time with him to distract from the gaping emotional damage Edward’s
flight has wrought in her. Despite the sentiment not being requited, Jacob perceives
their relationship as more than platonic, constantly professing his love for Bella. She
admits she cares for him, reveling in his physical warmth and unconditional
friendship, which consequently increases his affection for her. Although she refuses
to view Jacob as love object, she considers him her possession and encourages his
attentions: “He was not my Jacob, but he could be…In so many real ways, I did love
him…Right now, I could choose to have him belong to me” (411). She also revels in
her power over him: ”I could stake a claim. I had that much within my power” (375).
Bella becomes accustomed to the emotional and physical intimacy between her and
Jacob (i.e. he puts his arm around her), but denies him the sexual consummation he
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desires, just as Edward denies Bella’s desire to sexually consummate their
relationship.
Eclipse opens with a strained letter from Jacob relating his pained pining for Bella.
Just as
Edward left Bella, resulting in her catatonic depression, so too does Bella leave
Jacob. However, despite her return to Edward’s cold but strong arms, she wants to
keep Jacob around as well— and the latter agrees to the arrangement, forcing Bella
to pronounce Jacob “a glutton for punishment” (Eclipse 329). Indeed, “a
sadomasochistic relationship is comprehensible, if not desirable [to Jacob], and he
contemplates further possibilities for Bella to inflict pain upon him so that their
friendship will cohere to the sadomasochistic parameters he has come to expect”
(Pugh 152).
Yet Bella, perhaps because she is female, does not possess full mastery over
the role of sadist. Like Severin with Wanda/Venus, Jacob often appears to control the
sadomasochistic “script.” When Jacob take liberties with his and Bella’s relationship,
she reacts as cold Venus— but she also is not in control: “I let my hands drop to my
side, and shut down. I opened my eyes and didn’t fight, didn’t feel…just waited for
him to stop…he pressed his lips softly to mine again, once, twice…and a third time. I
pretended I was a statue and waited” (331). In addition, she must constantly deploy
the threat of Edward as a weapon in order to sustain the role of sadist, as when she
retorts: “‘I can’t wait to see what Edward does to you! I hope he snaps your neck,
you pushy, obnoxious, moronic DOG!...I hate you, Jacob Black’” (332). Finally, Bella’s
realization she is actually in love with Jacob endangers her sadistic pleasures and
undermines her sadistic control, as she masochistically “hope[s] [she] would really
suffer” (528) for her previous cruelty toward Jacob. As Pugh writes, “Despite the
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sadomasochistic torment Bella inflicts upon him, Jacob realizes that Bella’s more
natural role is masochistic rather than sadistic” (152). In sum, Bella is not much of a
sadist—she really needs Edward to help her with that, especially because she does
not possess the masculine strength required to effectively physically beat Jacob.
At the beginning of Breaking Dawn, Edward and Bella marry, allowing Jacob to
reengage with the role of masochist. Once Jacob learns of Bella’s dangerous
pregnancy, he rushes to see her, acknowledging, “As much as I knew it was a stupid
thing to do, I couldn’t stop myself. I must be some kind of masochist” (291). Bella’s
willing return to Edward—and to her role as masochist—inflicts (sadistic) pain on
Jacob, as does her urging of Edward to hurt her former best friend. Whenever Jacob
displeases her, Bella wants Edward to kill him; her desire to view her beater beating
another (Jacob) further enacts her sadism—but only via the agency of the beater,
who is not Bella. This rivalry correlates to the beating fantasy’s first stage—“My
father is beating the child whom I hate” (Massé 67)—leaving Bella in the role of
sadistic spectator. In addition, the competition Bella creates between Edward and
Jacob reconstructs the traditional gender narrative of mating males as natural
enemies (vampire versus wolf), vying to display their male prowess and strength for
the observing female prize. Ultimately, with the Twilight series, all romantic
relationships inevitably dissolve to prioritize the series’ patriarchal politics of male
sadism and female masochism: Bella will return to Edward, and Jacob will learn to
play the role of dominating male protector to Bella’s and Edward’s daughter
Renesmee.
Whether as masochist or sadist, Bella always relies on a male for her
construction and maintenance of self-identity: “It had not been Edward and Jacob
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that I’d been trying to force together, it was the two parts of myself, Edward’s Bella
and Jacob’s Bella. But they could not exist together, and I never should have tried”
(Eclipse 608). Bella is not independent, her identity bifurcated to be either
possessed by Edward or to possess Jacob, to be beaten or beater.
Ultimately adhering to the role of beaten/bitten, Bella is a “‘normal’ female [who]
must find her pleasure in pain, satisfy active strivings through passivity, and know
her subjectivity only through an other” (Massé 77).
Given Bella’s wavering roles, with which does the audience, the third-party
spectator of the beating triangle, identify—beater or beaten? Bella’s “vicarious
identification with power (‘My father is beating the child whom I hate’) and with
subordination (‘My father is beating/loving me’) exists to satisfy her own needs”
(Massé 72), namely, her need for psychological and emotional cohesion. As Deleuze
writes, “the art of suspense always places us on the side of the victim and forces us
to identify with him, whereas the gathering momentum of repetition tends to force
us onto the side of the torturer and make us identify with the sadistic hero” (34). If
this is the case, then both Jacob as Bella’s victim and Edward as Bella’s torturer
should prove equally compelling to readers and moviegoers—and this is indeed the
case.
Perhaps the audience’s reception and identification are framed by their choice of
Edward or Jacob as triumphant romantic hero, as “fans’ response to this
triangulation of desire, including their Team Edward, Team Jacob…camps, frame
readers as actively choosing their ‘hero’ rather than letting the narrative do it for
them” (Wilson 58). In either case, with either love object, sadomasochistic behavior
becomes the romantic norm in this young adult series.
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Child-Women: Infantilizing the Woman, Sexualizing the Child
“You think you’ll be part of my family as my son-in-law!” I
screeched… “No!” Jacob was insisting at the same time.
“How can you even look at it that way? She’s just a baby, for crying
out loud!” “That’s my point!” I yelled.
Stephenie Meyer
Breaking Dawn
As Platt writes, “[b]ecause YA [young adult] fiction often focuses on the
transition from childhood to adulthood through significant life experiences, the
figure of the teenage girl has come to symbolize both childhood and womanhood,
allowing young female protagonists to be simultaneously infantilized and sexualized,
reflecting a gender ideology that likens women to children while also viewing them
as sexual objects” (74). In the Twilight series, Bella is often depicted in ways that
infantilize her, despite the fact that she mothers her own mother and becomes a
mother herself. This is seen most frequently in terms of her fragile physicality and in
her inability to make adult choices without Edward’s help. However, the problematic
depiction of the child-woman attains perverse and extreme articulation through the
character of Renesmee. This vampire-human hybrid will achieve physical adulthood
by the age of seven, at which time it is expected she will marry pseudo-werewolf
Jacob Black. The Quileute (male) wolves—of whom Jacob is a member—imprint on
female babies as their soul mates, which, in turn, exacerbates the series’
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heteronormative monogamous themes by introducing pedophilia. Even at six
months old (and large for her age), Renesmee, imprinted on by Jacob, becomes the
object of Jacob’s scopophilic gaze and, as Bella puts it, he believes he holds “‘some
moronic wolfy claim to her’” (449). In the character of Renesmee, Meyer rewrites
Rice’s vampire child
Claudia, yet, while each child-woman/woman-child has contrasting attributes, both
represent constructed and constricting roles associated with the feminine and the
literal and metaphorical infantilization of women within patriarchal societies.
Bella as Child-Woman: The Infantilization of Women
In New Moon, after Edward deserts her in the middle of a forest and abandons
Forks altogether, leaving her alone to self-destruct, Bella loses consciousness
(recurring loss of consciousness also paralleling women’s stereotypical tendency to
faint). Bella becomes emotionally debilitated as a result of Edward’s exodus,
uttering these last lines before four months of narrative silence: “The waves of pain
that had only lapped at me before now reared high up and washed over my head,
pulling me under. I did not resurface” (84). So dependent on Edward for her
emotional well-being, Bella-minus-Edward regresses to a state of infancy, miserable
and unable to care for herself due to his abandonment: “Bella, because she is the
weak and vulnerable one, is in constant need of care and protection…if she is to
survive, they must be together” (Miller 167-8). Her comatose cataclysm further
affirms both her role as damsel in distress and confirms her reliance on men,
depicting females as victims and/or emotional babies. However, it is Bella’s physical
vulnerability which most often suggests her infantilization within these novels.
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In the opening pages of Twilight, Bella introduces herself as uncoordinated
and unathletic: “I had always been slender, but somehow, obviously not an athlete; I
didn’t have the necessary hand-eye coordination to play sports without humiliating
myself—and harming both myself and anyone else who stood too close” (10). This
negative self-prescription is emphasized in Edward’s characterization of her as
“incredibly breakable” (Twilight 310), necessitating his paternal protection as a
result. Her fragility and dependence on others is most obvious in Edward’s “cradling
her, carrying her…even strapping her into her car seat” (Wilson 96). Although
Bella’s gender is not acknowledged as the reason for her frailty, Twilight’s traditional
male and female roles depict masculinity as powerful and femininity as powerless,
as Miller explains:
. . . male characters have roles or occupations that establish and support their
strength, rationality, and protector status (i.e., police chief, town doctor, or
tribal elder). Meanwhile, female characters in Twilight are symbolically
annihilated; they are largely trivialized and either “symbolized as child-like
adornments who need to be protected or they are dismissed to the protective
confines of the home.” (166)
Incapable of protecting herself from adverse situations caused by her own actions or
by the actions of others, Bella as traditional female and damsel in distress thus must
(fall victim to or) be taken care of by males. Therefore, the masochistic female
functions, in many respects, as a child—a child who wishes to be both beaten and
saved by the beater.
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Renesmee as Woman-Child: The Sexualization of Children
Renesmee borrows from Anne Rice’s Claudia, inverting the latter’s age and
development. Claudia’s vampiric life begins at age five, through the blood-sucking
“birthing” by two fathers, Louis and Lestat; heinously stunted, she remains trapped
in the body of a fiveyear-old, while her mental and emotional faculties reach full
maturation. In contrast,
Renesmee’s vampiric/human birth occurs naturally (or unnaturally given Bella’s
violent labors), the product of heterosexual liaison, and her rapid physical growth
(she will reach physical—and presumably sexual—maturation by age seven) belies
the mental and emotional child within.
“Immortal children” (547), vampirized at a young age like Rice’s Claudia, are
an abomination in Meyer’s world. The Volturi destroy these infantile vampires due to
their inability to “be taught. They were frozen at whatever level of development
they’d achieved before being bitten” (34). In contrast to Claudia, these children
never grow but remain mentally and emotionally frozen at their stunted corporeal
age. Unlike Claudia who desires to become more than a doll, Meyer’s child vampires
only desire to feed “and no words of warning could restrain them” (34). These are
children, physically and psychologically, and, thus, do not possess—or at least do
not appear to possess—the problematic patriarchal and cultural implications of
Claudia and Renesmee. As anti-Claudia, Renesmee possesses adult traits, though an
infant:
At three months, Renesmee could have been a big one-year-old, or a small
two-year-old. She wasn’t shaped exactly like a toddler; she was leaner and more
graceful, her proportions were more even, like an adult’s…Renesmee could speak
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with flawless grammar and articulation, but she rarely bothered, preferring to simply
show people what she wanted. She could not only walk but run and dance. She
could even read. (529) Bella’s description of her child’s body as proportionally “like
an adult’s” problematically emphasizes Renesmee’s paradoxical construction as a
child in a woman’s body, and, despite the novel’s insistence on her psychological
and intellectual growth equaling her physical growth, she remains a child in terms of
experiential learning, emotional growth, and chronological age.
At age seven, Renesmee will remain a child though in a woman’s body. Although
Renesmee’s mind will eventually catch up with her body (something that Claudia’s
body could never do with her mind), it is undeniable that the future of Renesmee’s
mind, body, and self-identity have already been secured at the age of six months—
by Jacob.
In order to understand the full implications of Renesmee’s infant
indoctrination into patriarchy, it is important to explore the patrilineal undertones of
Bella’s pregnancy. To begin with, Edward’s ability to reproduce is Meyer’s unique
addition to the otherwise sterile vampires of legend; prior to the Cullens, vampiric
reproduction is only through blood-siring, not sex. Meyer’s vampires, however,
combine married monogamy and human procreation with the male vampire’s phallic
penetration (not just dental but also genital). Only male vampires are equipped with
genital procreative abilities; Twilight’s female vampires are sterile because their
cycles of menstruation and ovulation are lost in their vampiric transformation, while
male vampires remain fertile due to Meyer’s (erroneous) belief that semen
production does not undergo cyclical changes. (Apparently, cyclical rhythms of all
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kinds cease once one becomes a Twilight vampire, including sleeping and
breathing.) Averill explicates:
So, unlike their female counterparts, their [male vampire] fertility continues…
It is worth noting that the claim Meyer makes in regard to the male body not
requiring ‘change’ to produce sperm is a false assertion. Like the cycles of
menstruation, sperm require functioning and producing systems. It is equally
interesting that Meyer disregards or elevates male reproduction above this
need for change. (234)
Though Edward does not realize it is possible to impregnate a human when he
consummates his marriage to Bella, male vampires are clearly constructed as the
superior sex because Meyer’s vampires further promote patriarchal (reproductive)
privilege.
Inside the womb, Renesmee exhibits “remarkably developed faculties” (339).
Renesmee’s rapid growth is complemented by her power to produce visions, her
telepathic agency a reversal of Edward’s mind-reading epistemophilia. Before
developing the ability to speak, Renesmee is able to communicate by conjuring
images and projecting them into other’s minds: “‘She showed me that?’…’It was the
only memory she had of you’…It was obvious he’d seen what she was showing me
as she thought of it” (Breaking Dawn 446). This interestingly illustrates and inverts
our model of Edward’s scopophilia/epistemophilia, as Renesmee serves as both
subject channeling the images she sees and as object being seen through. Others
view her visions, positioning her as exhibitionist and upholding the male/female
sadist/masochist dyad; however, these visions reproduce what she sees/knows, thus
fusing scopophilia/epistemophilia with exhibitionism. This power is her
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communicative agency as an infant, and through it she is able to speak with and
understand others. Perhaps her hybridity as vampire-human deconstructs these
binaries between viewer/viewed and knowing/known, similarly to how Bella’s
sadomasochistic relationships are dissolved—or at least mitigated—by her
vampirization.
Nonetheless, Renesmee is also subjected to Jacob’s imprinting as the object
of his scopophilic gaze. Similar to animals imprinting on their mothers or mates, the
Quileute wolves imprint on their female beloveds, further propagating the series’
overarching heteronormativity, older male/younger female pairings, and “soul
mate” monogamous marriages. Though Jacob functions as masochist in his
relationship with Bella, his unrequited love for Bella requires resolution, and so is
projected onto/transferred to Renesmee when he first sees Bella’s child as an infant:
“It was the baby girl in the blond vampire’s arms that held me here now. Renesmee”
(360). There is no real choice involved for imprinted girls, yet, as
Meyer would have it, they love their wolf patriarchs, as Donnelly notes:
There is no room for question and no way out for the chosen wolf…With
imprinting, the female technically has a choice but it is assumed she would
never want to decline the male wolf’s attentions…She is passive, chosen, and
bound by his destiny. What’s even more disturbing is that this ‘imprinting’ can
often occur with children, even infants. These young girls are bound to grown
men before they even have a sense of self; destined to become wives and
mothers with no real chance to date or explore themselves before making a
lifetime commitment. (188)
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The imprinting gaze is not overtly sexual in its inception, but, rather, protective,
dominating, and possessive; however, it is implicitly sexual, as the female infant
child has already been chosen as mate and love object. Meyer’s series implies that
Renesmee will become Jacob’s wife/lover—akin to Claudia as Louis’s child bride—in
six years’ time, once she reaches physical maturation. Bella reacts with violence
(due to maternal protection, jealousy, sadism, or some combination thereof) once
she interprets Jacob’s scopophilic imprinting of her daughter: “I puzzled over it,
watching him stare at my daughter. Staring at her like…like he was a blind man
seeing the sun for the very first time…‘You stupid mutt! How could you? My baby!’”
(448-9). Nonetheless, Breaking Dawn views Bella’s outrage as cute and even
laughable, as it offers Jacob the compensatory prize of the infant girl child. Although
Meyer clearly seeks to rewrite Claudia more positively through the character of
Renesmee (as Renesmee is not killed and the Twilight series ends happily ever
after), this pedophilic subtext between imprinted child and adult imprinter
paradoxically parallels Rice’s vampires, with Louis simultaneously functioning as
Claudia’s mother/father and lover. While Renesmee is not considered the monstrous-
feminine, as she does not attempt to subvert patriarchy and so lives happily ever
after, her characterization engenders similar implications as Claudia’s.
As both a physically mature baby and scopophilic object, Renesmee exhibits
“what Durham calls the ‘pretty babies’ syndrome,” in which “the sexualization of
young females allows for a ‘regressive and oppressive gender politics’ and ‘a
version of sex that is disempowering and objectifying’ (55, 118)” (Wilson 120). As
Durham writes, “[l]ittle girls fit more easily into a conventional mold of female
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sexuality: a perspective in which she lacks authority over her own body and is
therefore less threatening than any adult woman today.
Because of this, little girls epitomize a patriarchal society’s ideal of compliant, docile
sexuality” (129). Claudia and Renesmee are thus child-women, one a woman in a
child’s body and the other a child in a woman’s body, while Bella is an adult woman
who acts the part of a child. Females, regardless of age, are thus regarded
simultaneously as perpetual infants and sexual objects, easily controllable by their
paternal patriarchs.
Conclusion
The indelible impression the Twilight series has left on the public imagination
is impossible to ignore, as its literary incarnation “has sold more than 85 million
copies worldwide and has been translated into 37 languages…Together the four
books have spent 235 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list” (Click, Aubrey,
and Behm-Morawitz 3). Additionally, it is one of the highest-grossing film series,
Twilight alone breaking box-office records with $69.6 million its first weekend and a
total of $351.5 million internationally, while “New Moon earned
$709.8 million worldwide” (Parke 37). Reaching a fanbase predominantly composed
of females (both young and old!), the Twilight series has generated much reception,
both positive and negative, both fanatical and critical. The franchise has spawned
innumerable websites devoted to self-named Twi-hard fan discussion (from The
Twilight Lexicon to Twilight Moms); conventions (Twi-Con); tourism to Forks,
Washington; and merchandising (Wilson 6-8, 191). The problem, of course, is the
fact that the franchise reproduces and perpetuates gender inequality through male
sadism and female masochism, and the popularity of the Twilight books and movies
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suggests a disturbing acceptance of both in twenty-first-century American culture, a
point to be discussed more thoroughly in the conclusion of this thesis.
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